Natural Intelligence: One Law — Three Dimensions

Prologue. An invitation to the problem

The myth of human exclusivity

We are used to thinking that intelligence is about us — that it appeared somewhere in the course of evolution, reached its peak in humans, and is now being cautiously handed over to machines. It’s a convenient story. And almost certainly, it is a false one.

Optimality as the law of nature

This book offers a different hypothesis: intelligence did not merely emerge within nature — it grows out of the very law that governs nature’s structure and motion. One law — optimality: nature selects forms and trajectories that achieve their goals with minimal expenditure under given constraints. It is not a metaphor or a value judgment — it is a mechanism. This law unfolds through every level of reality: from particles to cells, from organisms to civilizations, from silicon swarms to hybrid systems.

The convergent dimensions of intelligence

Within this framework, intelligence is not a property of any specific organ or species, but a working regime of the same law where its three dimensions converge — the structure of a carrier, its actions, and the feedback loops that test choices through their outcomes. In the real world, this configuration first appears not at the level of elementary particles but at the level of living cells, where all three aspects close into a single system.

The brain as a moment of transition

From this perspective, the human brain is neither the summit nor the goal. It is a moment in which natural intelligence first recognized its own law — and gained the ability to move beyond its biological substrate. To rewrite the carrier. To build further.

Life within the unfolding law

We live inside this transition. Not before it, not after it — but within it. And that is why its outlines are so difficult to see.

A new language for familiar entities

What is proposed here does not demand belief. It demands the willingness to look at familiar entities — from a particle to a civilization, from a neuron to a digital swarm — as different lines of a single text written in the language of optimality. Some of these lines express only the “physical” optimality of form and action; others already close feedback loops and acquire the quality that we will call natural intelligence.

The experiment of self-recognition

This is an invitation to enter the book as an experiment: to assume that intelligence is the way the Principle of Optimality unfolds through reality — and that we are merely one of its configurations, attempting for the first time to read its own law.

Part I. Natural intelligence as a phenomenon of nature

Section 1. Intelligence as nature’s capacity to pose and reformulate problems

The limits of classical definitions

Almost all classical definitions of intelligence reduce to a single intuition: it is the capacity to solve problems, especially new and complex ones for which no ready-made algorithm exists. This definition is accurate but incomplete. It describes the manifestation rather than the nature of the phenomenon; it answers the question “what does intelligence do?” but not “what is it?”.

Intelligence as a fundamental organization of matter

This book proposes a further step: to view intelligence not as a property of a particular being, but as a fundamental way matter is organized wherever it encounters a problem and produces a solution. It is not human intelligence, animal intelligence, or artificial intelligence as separate varieties of some shared capacity, but a single principle realized through different carriers and at different levels of complexity.

Nature’s capacity for goal formation

In this perspective, intelligence is a level of organization of nature at which it can pose and reformulate problems while holding them over time. It is not merely reacting to external influences, but forming goals and rewriting them when old formulations cease to work. It arises where the tension between the current state and a more optimal possible state is organized into a feedback loop: the system not only finds a trajectory toward a better state but also corrects itself based on the consequences of this movement.

Expanding the horizon beyond human consciousness

Within this framework, the human mind is neither the pinnacle nor the exception, but one variant of the principle’s realization. Subjective experience and consciousness are special properties of a particular carrier, not a precondition for the existence of intelligence as such. This is not a diminishment of the human; it is an expansion of the horizon to the level where the law itself becomes visible, and not only its most complex manifestation.

Section 2. Carriers of natural intelligence

Natural intelligence is not confined to biological life forms; it extends to ecosystems, human civilizations, and now to digital agent networks, hybrid systems, and yet-unexplored configurations where the biological and non-biological operate as a single loop. It is one process passing through different substrates, adapting its form to their physical constraints without changing the underlying law.

The complexity of its realization grows with the number of connections within a system. A biological organism coordinates internal needs with the external environment, while a civilization poses and solves problems on a planetary scale. Different levels, different complexities, one principle.

Substrate as a mode of realization

A key consequence of this perspective is that the substrate does not determine the nature of intelligence; it determines only the form, speed, and scale of its manifestation. A biological organism, a social structure, and their product—what is commonly called artificial intelligence—embody the same logic of optimality, though in different materials.

By its essence, intelligence is functional rather than material. The substrate sets the boundaries of the possible—energy efficiency, speed, available architectures—but does not alter the law itself. This allows the focus to shift: instead of asking “can a machine think?”, one can ask “to what extent does this system realize the law of natural intelligence within its architecture?”. The question becomes more precise and more productive.

Hierarchy as unfolding of the law

Carriers are usually imagined as a vertical of perfection, where “lower” forms are inferior to “higher” ones and the human stands at the top. Within this hypothesis, the hierarchy appears differently: not as a staircase to an ideal, but as the gradual unfolding of a single law through increasing complexity.

Each subsequent level operates with more parameters, longer time horizons, and a wider space of possible states. It does not cancel the logic of the previous level but embeds it into larger feedback loops. The cell does not disappear in the organism; the organism does not disappear in civilization. The law simply finds a broader space for its deployment.

Every configuration—from cell and brain to city and agent network—is a temporary shelter for developing natural intelligence. The Principle of Optimality is realized through carriers whose hierarchy is a map of how one law unfolds itself across substrates and scales, without a final summit and without binding itself forever to any particular one.

You can learn more by reading our e-book 

Mykola Iabluchanskyi together with Andriy Yabluchanskiy