“My work, humble though it is, could be metaphied as a relational lighthouse. That is to say that it serves two crucial and primary purposes, along with a zoo of lesser aims and effects. These are to demonstrate the presence of unseen dangers in the waters of our habitual relationships with language, knowledge, culture and intelligence, and to signal a possibility of distributed benefit.

This latter is more complex. Everyone understands an alarm call. But only few can understand and respond adeptly to the call to form a mutually empowered distributed intelligence. Yet it is this latter function, even within a single mind, this dynamic ongoing collectivity of many intelligences and skills into an active integral, that actually supplies ‘the light’ upon which the former depends, for this is the light of insight.

This -method- of illumination has the power to deliver us from such otherwise unseen dangers as arise in our representational activity and cultures — while at the same time establishing a radically self-optimizing and mutual basis of sensing, awareness, attention, inspiration, and intent. And that is the basis of intelligence itself. If we cannot assemble that together, we are not yet intelligent.”

— an anonymous informant