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.

Storythinking

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?