Primal Intelligence

Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know

https://www.amazon.com/Primal-Intelligence-Smarter-Than-Know-ebook/dp/B0DN9GQ84V

Core Message

My theory is that intuition, commonsense, and the rest of Primal Intelligence are driven by narrative cognition. Or to put it in regular speak: The human brain is real-life smart because it thinks in story.

Expert Paradox

The pilot calls this the paradox of expertise: “The paradox is that an expert is a learner who doesn’t learn. To become an expert, she had to learn. But an expert is someone who knows. And when you know, you don’t need to learn. Meaning that the expert has mastered a skill—learning—that she’s now wasting.”

Intro

To probe the incredible while avoiding debacle, the Primal trial would need to be run by individuals with big imaginations but no patience for bullshit. Such individuals were uncommon, but the Army did have a pipeline for making them. A pipeline at U.S. Special Operations.

Magic happy was nice ideas that broke on contact with reality. Magic happy was stoner mysticism and college philosophy. Magic happy was a rearguard luxury and a frontline catastrophe.

The training worked. The Operators saw the future faster. They healed quicker from trauma. Faced with life-and-death situations, they chose wiser.In 2023, the Army awarded the Fletcher lab a medal for “groundbreaking research,” formally recognizing the existence of Primal.

Intuition: Exceptional Information

Every intuition has the same real-world source. The source is: exceptional information.

Identifying exceptional information requires initiative.

Exceptional information demonstrates: Intuition detects a rupture in a standard narrative, driving a break with the past. To make that break, we need what the Army manual calls initiative, which is another way of saying running ahead of data.

U.S. SPECIAL OPERATIONS HAS A method for activating intuition.

If you can’t see what’s exceptional, then treat everything as exceptional. “Treat everything as exceptional?” I verify. “That’s right. The way you saw the world as a child.”

Assume that everything you see is special.

“Well, can you show me a way to mind travel?”

Mind travel in museum. Or Pineland

'Shift to narrative' technique.

Imagination

While logic computes what is probable, story creates what is possible.

The possible is an event that has never happened but could, because it doesn’t contradict the rules of its environment.

The possible has two biological advantages over the probable. First, it can accelerate evolution. Instead of sticking cautiously to what worked yesterday, it can leap into the future, grabbing opportunity. Second, it can act with initiative in uncertainty. It doesn’t need lots of reliable data.

Operators think in story. When Operators storythink about the past, they reflect on events they’ve witnessed, asking why. Why did that happen the way it did? Why did it happen at all? When Operators storythink about the future, they imagine events that could happen, asking what if. What if I try this? What if my adversary tries that?

How to develop storythink? “Planning is the main use of imagination,". What’s the reason that plans fail? The reason is, they didn’t consider enough possibilities. They had too narrow a view of what could happen. They were unimaginative.

Story's primordial biological purpose isn’t verbal or wishful. It’s cerebral and practical: planning.

Long term strategy. One goal, 100 ways to get there. Defined strategy, unlimited tactics. Establish a clear one. Or when pressure hits, priorities conflict. Strategy defines why. What ifs are the process of unlimiting tactics. Fusion of dexterity and direction.

Study effective planners. Beethoven.

The Operators have achieved that same inventive pace, their inspiration firing quicker than my eye can process. What’s the source of their rapid genius? How are they hatching effective plans so fast?

When your past is integrated, it clarifies why you live, investing you with long-range direction. When your future is branched, it widens your potential what ifs, expanding your possible paths to get there.

To Act Fast: Emotion

Chapter explains primal reasons for all emotions. Very good.

I discovered a biological explanation for their apparently preternatural powers of self- assessment: Their emotions were monitoring their mental life narrative, allowing them to redirect when the narrative departed from its most effective shape.

Fear is smart. Very smart. It is sending you critical intel. That intel is: You have no plan.

Why is fear the emotion that our brain evolved to signal this? Why out of all the signals that our biology could have evolved, did our brain develop an emotion that makes our knees weak and our mind blank? The answer is: Our brain has evolved a bias to action, because action is how we learn.

To get out of the box, Operators are taught to push their gaze forward, reaching for the horizon.

First-step plan - first step after fear.

Shift your relationship to fear. If you take fear as an opportunity to push your eyes toward your primary purpose, you bolster not only your confidence but also your competence,

To fear, add anger = flight or fight. Fight=tunnel vision and force to use the only one path, which can work. Anger is mojo/focus that breaks through to your goal. OR - create a second plan, which you can create by looking for exceptional information.

Emotion reset - is simply 'i've done it before, i can do it again'

The Origin of Logic and Story

• Eat, is the origin of logic. The second, Don’t get eaten, is the origin of story
• Logic’s three operations: AND-OR-NOT.
• When neuron A extends a path to neuron B, that’s not a MOS transistor thinking A = B. It’s a synapse thinking A leads to B, or in other words, A → B.
• A → B isn’t better than A = B. Yet it’s often more useful, which is why it exists in the brain.
• STORY IS A SEQUENCE OF actions: This event caused that event, which caused another event.
• storythinking, or we’re engaging narrative cognition - we’re engaging narrative cognition, which differs from deduction, interpretation, critical thinking, and the rest of logic.
• Simple consciousness is spatial and sensory, reflecting its origins in vision. (This relationship between sentience and seeing is why we close our eyes to sleep.) Simple consciousness is thus logical. Self-consciousness is temporal and imagined. It begins with the awareness of our self continuing in time, or in other words, with the awareness that our now has come from our past. That’s a mental story of cause → effect. Self-consciousness is thus narrative.
• ENIAC - 1943 - Guilford proposed that innovation was a combination of two such protocols: divergent thinking and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking is random; it arbitrarily associates old ideas to produce new ones. When done at scale—in team brainstorming sessions or with computers—it can produce long lists of novelties. Convergent thinking is logical; it refines the results of divergent thinking via pattern finding and prototype iteration. When fed the novelties produced by brainstormers or computers, it can identify those that fit models of past successes, eliminating illogical misfires and identifying high-probability breakthroughs. This two-step protocol for computing new ideas became known among Guilford’s followers as ideation.
• This algorithmic way of life can do impressive things. Yet it has an obvious limit: optimization can improve existing products and processes, but it cannot create original ones. No matter how big the computer or ingenious the programmer, logic cannot invent new technology, new markets, new art, or new business—or so commonsense suggests. But in our modern world, programmers have overturned that commonsense. They have claimed that their computational methods can do more than optimization; they have claimed that they can do innovation.
• AI - It is half our gray matter accelerated and the other half lobotomized. It has no commonsense, imagination, or emotion. So it will forever be incompetent at innovation—and at strategy, communication, and leadership.
• We believe that to activate the parts of the human brain that are smarter than a computer, it’s necessary to venture beyond modern psychology into a science more ancient and imaginative.

Storythinking

• The brain thinks in narrative, so its operation can be studied through the mechanics of story. Beyond microscopes and neuron-level analysis, intuition and commonsense applied to novels, myths, and plays offer a legitimate path to understanding how thinking works.
• Shakespeare developed a simple but original method for inventing stories that worked. He was not only a master of language, but a systematic innovator who repeatedly altered narrative structure itself—and succeeded each time.
• “If you can create a story that works, you can change the future.”
• PROJECT Narrative, the world’s leading academic institute for the study of stories.
• Strategy was the story of what the organization wanted to do, operations was the story of what the organization was actually doing, and marketing was the story of what the organization wanted people to think it was doing.
• Other people were trapped in bias, emotion, or incomplete data. Other people therefore needed to be better informed—or, when their irrationality was intractable, to be manipulated into good decisions via incentives, nudges, and an enlightened “choice architecture.” This, the three tribes believed, was where marketing came in. Marketing deployed narrative to program people with the right data or behaviors, steering the mob onto the path of reason. Tell the correct stories and you could eliminate prejudice, boost well-being, and get the world to buy your wholesome products, ushering in an optimized future of healthy politics, healthy ethics, and healthy balance sheets.
• Could I help their brains create more strategies—more stories—that worked? Yes, I said. To prove it, I asked the execs to explain their current products and operations. Then I told them future products and operations that Shakespeare might invent as sequels. My goal in these conversations was to encourage the execs to read Shakespeare. But this is not what happened. Instead, the execs offered to pay me thousands of dollars an hour to be a consultant. I was, they told me, a natural—at strategy, at tech, at health care, at management, at lumber, at pet spa operations, at venture capital. I had been born with the gift: an intuitive grasp of business.
• I TOLD THE CEOS THAT my useful advice derived from the theory I’d developed at Yale and Pixar: There’s a method for inventing stories that work. When I unveiled that theory, the business execs thought it was simply an insight into screenwriting, marketing, and other forms of storytelling. But it was much more.
• Another term for story is plot. Another term for plot is plan. And a plan is a path through life
• Shakespeare created a method for making new plans. A method for shifting course, adapting to circumstance, and driving change. This method differed fundamentally from rational decision-making. In rational decision-making, you use data to pick the best option. With Shakespeare’s method, you use imagination to create a new option.
• Shakespeare passed along a method for making new plans. New plans, as we’ve seen, are new stories. If you can invent one, you can invent the other.
• From Marlowe’s plays Shakespeare borrowed the character of an ambitiously inventive plotter, and to create the plot of his own play, he then thought like Richard III, asking himself: What would an ambitiously inventive plotter do? After Shakespeare finished Richard III, he then kept plotting. He invented the stories of Hamlet and Cleopatra. And he invented the business stratagems that made his company wealthy. So the thin evidence of history suggests: Shakespeare learned to plot by reading a story about a plotter. That story activated his imagination, turning him into an effective real-world planner. Gratified by his subsequent success, he then paid it forward, creating new stories that activated the imaginations of his own audiences, training their brains to invent fresh strategies for thriving at life.
• They’d accomplished remarkable feats, creating the impression that they were remarkable too. It was not so, they knew. They were ordinary people who’d done the extraordinary, aided by the right equipment.
• Whatever special know-how you have, you gotta hand it to the team. You gotta make yourself expendable, because at any moment, a bullet can take you out. Teach us your way of thinking, and we can carry on the mission for you.
• You can create the future by seeing the possible faster.

Three Tribes of Rational Decision-Making

1. The classic rationalists. They believed in rational-choice theory and quantitative economics. They were students of management, which they saw as a universal science that enabled its disciples to run any business. Dish soap, TV shows, health care: all were digits that could be crunched into quarterly earnings reports.

2. The rational humanists. They stressed the importance of empathy and ideation. They had an affinity for design and quoted behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely. They spoke of pain points and typical users. They believed in personality tests and demographics.

3. The AI futurists. They saw that computers processed data faster than humans, and since they viewed data as the key to smart choices, they concluded that it wouldn’t be long before computers replaced human leaders.

These tribes viewed themselves as rivals, but they all shared the same basic model of intelligence: rational decision-making.

Notes

Communications

Hi Sarah,

Just read Primal Intelligence, and we are running a summer program and residency in integrated civilization systems engineering. We are training a 100 civilization special ops people - training for a real experimental community to reimagine a positive future. Please see my TED Talk in the Global Village Construction Set. Now we are breaking ground and planning for this experimental extreme production community.

I am trying to sell the idea, and having a hard time. Though we just got 30M views on Instagram, nobody is signing up for the civilization reboot induction program which provides the necessary immersion training. Our story may need tuning.

Can you help us craft the story? Is this work compelling to you? I am hoping that the primal intelligence aspect in our work comes through to you and grabs your interest.

Thanks, Marcin

Appendix

• intuition sparks plans. Intuition comes from spotting exceptions. To do that, delay Why - a heavy cognitive function. A gazelle doesn't ask why lions hunt.
• "To imagine more precisely, restrict yourself to one top goal." Why? Because imagination is not maximized by freedom; it is sharpened by constraint—and a single top goal provides the strongest possible constraint.
• Emotion maintains your story by revealing when your past is fragmenting. How? Emotion detects narrative discontinuities. Emotion says: something no longer fits. Emotion pressures the system to repair the story. Emotion is the guardian of narrative integrity.
• Your four primal powers are stronger together. Imagination makes commonsense nimble; commonsense makes emotion effective; emotion makes intuition purposeful; intuition makes imagination perceptive.