Mistaking Stillness for Motion

Someone points to a tomato and says “That’s green”.

 

It is sitting on the table in front of us, in ordinary light. The rest of us have no hesitation in recognising is as red. The disagreement is not subtle and requires neither instruments nor careful comparison. We simply look and respond. Now there are several things we might say. We might check the lighting, or ask about colour blindness, or suggest moving closer. What we do not usually say is that the person is perceiving a green tomato. We do not treat the situation as if two equally valid perceptual worlds had opened up side by side. We accept the object as stable and assume that one of us is mistaken. 

 

Consider a different case. A figure is photographed mid‑stride, one foot lifted slightly off the ground. We say, quite readily, that the figure is “moving,” or that it “captures motion.” Or consider a film where bodies appear to walk, turn, speak. Here too we speak as if movement were present, even though nothing on the screen changes place in the ordinary sense. 

 

It is tempting, at this point, to treat these situations differently. In the first, we say someone is wrong; in the second, we say that something like motion is genuinely perceived. A distinction begins to form between error and experience, between mistake and what is given. 

 

But it is not clear that we need this distinction. 

 

If we return to the tomato, the matter is straightforward because we refuse to let the language run ahead of the situation. The person says “green”; we look again; we correct. Nothing is gained by introducing a special category of “experienced greenness” detached from the object itself. We simply say: this is what is there, and that is not how it is. 

 

Wittgenstein is helpful here, not because he settles the issue, but because he reminds us to look more carefully at how words are actually used. The difference between “it looks green” and “it is green” is not a matter of hidden contents, but of circumstances. We already navigate these shifts with ease. The difficulty arises when we begin to treat these flexible expressions as if they were reporting fixed elements of experience. The same temptation appears in the case of images. We say that the figure “moves,” and before long it is suggested that motion is somehow perceived in the image itself. The language, which began as a way of speaking within a shared practice, is taken as a description of what is present. Something subtle has changed, though nothing in the image has. 

 

If we turn from the tomato to more familiar visual effects, the situation does not become more obscure so much as more ordinary. Consider the Ames Room illusion, where one figure appears to grow while another shrinks as they move across the space. When first encountered, the effect can be striking. But once recognised, it does not continue to mislead in quite the same way. We learn how to take it. We would not normally say that one person is in fact larger than the other, any more than we would say the tomato is green. We say that it looks that way under certain conditions, from a certain position. The effect remains visible, but it no longer governs what we say is there. 

 

JL Austin shed some light on cases like this, noting how easily we move between “looks” and “is” without confusion. A straight stick half-submerged in water may look bent, but this does not lead us to believe that something has happened to its shape. The appearance is accommodated without needing to be granted independent standing. From here, the earlier examples begin to settle. A photograph or drawing may prompt us to say that a figure is “moving,” just as a shadow may suggest depth or a surface may seem wet. These belong to everyday experience. They arise quickly, and they are widely encountered, but they do not require us to suppose that motion, depth, or wetness have somehow entered into the thing before us. 

 

What is striking is how little strain is involved. We do not feel that our perception is being tested or stretched in these situations. On the contrary, they are often treated lightly, even playfully. A reflection that resembles water is not puzzling; a painted highlight that reads as gloss is simply effective. A sequence of still images that gives the impression of movement is familiar enough to pass unnoticed most of the time. In that sense, these are not special cases at all. They do not sit at the edges of perception, revealing hidden mechanisms. They are woven into ordinary experience. We encounter them, recognise them, and where it suits us, make use of them. The same drawing that seems so immediate on first viewing can, on a second look, be seen as nothing more than a set of marks. The shift is not dramatic. It is simply a change in how the situation is taken. 

 

It may be tempting, at this point, to say that in such cases we have a special kind of experience—one in which motion, depth, or transformation are somehow present despite not being physically realised. But this temptation begins to look less necessary once the earlier pattern is kept in view. The case of the tomato did not lead us to multiply colours; the Ames Room does not lead us to multiply sizes. In each case, we accept the object as steady and allow for the possibility that what is immediately taken need not settle what is the case. 

 

Something similar holds for moving images. When we watch a film, we speak naturally of people walking, turning, speaking to one another. The language is easy, and it works. But we do not ordinarily suppose that what we are seeing is a set of bodies displaced across space in front of us. We understand the arrangement. If anything, the familiarity of the situation allows us to move between ways of taking it without friction—seeing it now as a scene, now as a projection, now as a play of light. 

 

What emerges, across these examples, is not a new category of perception, but a continuity. We see, we take, and sometimes we take wrongly. Where the mistake is obvious, we correct it without fuss. Where it is stable and repeatable, we may even rely on it. But in neither case do we need to say that something has been added to the object, or that perception has taken on a different form. 

 

The earlier claim—that a picture might be perceived as temporally extended—can be approached again from this angle. What seemed at first like a substantive proposal begins to look like a redescription of something already familiar. We are observing that certain arrangements are readily taken as part of an unfolding event. That is true enough. But it does not follow that time is present in the picture, any more than it follows that greenness is present in the tomato when wrongly described. 

 

To put the matter gently: we may already have all the resources we need to describe what is happening, without asking more of the description than it can carry. 

If we draw these threads together, what comes into view is not a new account of perception, but a quieter adjustment in how we speak about what we already handle with ease. Across the examples—tomato, room, drawing, film—the same pattern repeats. We encounter something, we take it in a certain way, and where necessary, we correct ourselves. The correction does not require a shift into a different kind of experience; it is simply a refinement of the same one. 

 

This is perhaps easiest to miss where things work smoothly. The drawing that “moves,” the film that “shows” people walking, the surface that “looks wet”—all of these pass without comment because they serve us well. They guide attention, support recognition, and allow us to proceed without hesitation. It is only when we pause over the language, or attempt to give an account of what is happening, that the need for clarity arises. At that point, the temptation is to treat these ways of speaking as pointing toward something present in the experience itself—as if motion, depth, or transformation had entered into what is seen. But the earlier cases suggest a different approach. We need not multiply what is given in order to account for what is said. The flexibility lies in our use of language, and in our readiness to take things one way rather than another. Seen in this light, the force of the examples is cumulative but modest. Nothing dramatic is uncovered. There is no hidden layer revealed beneath ordinary perception. Instead, what becomes visible is the steadiness of a practice: we accept the object as fixed, and we allow that our immediate taking of it may sometimes need adjustment. Where no adjustment is required, we simply carry on. 

 

If there is any surprise here, it may be that so little turns on the distinction. The difference between seeing rightly and seeing wrongly, between taking something as it is and taking it as something else, does not divide experience into separate sorts. It only marks a difference in how well we have settled into the situation before us. 

 

From this perspective, the earlier tension begins to dissipate. The question is no longer whether motion, depth, or time are somehow present in what we see, but how we have come to speak as we do in situations where nothing of the sort is found. The answer lies less in the structure of perception than in the habits that shape our responses and descriptions. These habits are neither careless nor imprecise. They are, for the most part, well-tuned to the world we share. If anything shifts, it is simply a matter of noticing how much is already accounted for without saying more.

This essay was prompted by research published by Luca Marchetti 

Disciplined Observation

As a young child, I remember a teacher, Mr Taylor, urging us—quite insistently—to “see” the ellipse in a roll of masking tape placed on the desk. The instruction was clear enough, but it wouldn’t take hold. The tape remained, quite plainly, circular. The suggestion that it was, in some sense, an oval felt less like a discovery than an imposition—or perhaps a misunderstanding, either on our part or his. It was not that we resisted the idea; it was that we could not see what we were being told was before our eyes. I recall Mr Taylor’s look of exasperation quite vividly. It was matched by my own incomprehension and that of my classmate, Paul, my first rival in the intricacies of drawing.

Looking back, my difficulty was not a lack of effort or intelligence, but the absence of a suitable example or demonstration. A sheet of clear acetate and a traced outline would have helped make the point clear, as would a simple line drawing of an oval transformed with the addition of one or two clarifying lines. What was required, then, was not merely a different way of attending to the circumstances of seeing—closing one eye and remaining motionless would have helped—but seeing someone transform a simple ellipse into a convincing drawing of a circular roll of tape seen from an angle.

Observational drawing is often described as a matter of “learning to see,” or of unlearning habits that obscure perception. There is a certain practical utility in this way of speaking, but it is also misleading. What is being acquired is not a more accurate form of seeing in general, but a more specific and demanding one, suited to the requirements of representing three-dimensional appearances on a flat surface. Students are encouraged to adopt a set of mutually supportive procedures that are not minor adjustments. It is fair to call them “observational aids” but they are not aids in the usual sense. They deliberately constrain rather than augment vision: closing one eye, fixing the viewing position, holding it steady, and, if we seek naturalistic shading, occasionally squinting in order to register tonal relations. In everyday perception, such constraints are unnecessary. We move freely, we use both eyes, and we register what holds across changing circumstances. Objects are not experienced as a succession of flat projections, but as continuous, spatial interrelations. 

Observational drawing works against this integration. It requires that one remains stationary long enough for the appearance of flatness to be held in place and transposed to paper.
Drawings that do not conform to these conventions are frequently described as “naive,” “primitive,” or “simplistic,” as though the flaw is not merely procedural, but something to be found not on the paper, but in the student. The language is familiar enough to pass without comment, but it betrays attitudes that no longer sit comfortably within contemporary teaching. Furthermore, it positions one system of depiction as authoritative, and others as inferior or misguided versions of it. The assumption is difficult to sustain. What is being described as “naive” drawing is, in many cases, a perfectly reasonable and intelligent, albeit intuitive, conversion of perceived reality onto a flat surface. It tends to preserve what we ordinarily register: the relative stability of objects, their proportions, their recognisable forms and outlines. A cup remains circular; a table retains 4 legs of equal length; a figure lies horizontal rather than compressing into perspectival distortion. These are not perceptual failures or failures to pick up visual cues. They are evidence of a different set of priorities and indeed skills.

The distinction becomes clearer when the constraints of the surface are removed. Asked to model in clay from forms felt but not seen, those same individuals often show no correlated difficulty in judging volume, proportion, or spatial relation. Whatever is absent in their drawings does not extend to their perception. The difficulty lies not in seeing, but in the demands imposed by a particular representational system.

Observational drawing, then, relies on a carefully constructed set of conventions—counterintuitive adjustments to perception that serve as solutions to a representational problem. A flat surface does not readily accommodate three-dimensional relations without such pictorial devices. Both systems involve compromise, each with its own advantages and limitations.

To see the visual field as flat is therefore an achievement—but a very particular one. It is tied to the requirements of depiction rather than to perception more generally. Outside that context, it would be a constraint rather than an advance. In everyday life, it would be of limited use to treat objects as if they were projections from a single fixed point of view. We rely instead on their constancy across movement and change. It becomes misleading, then, to treat one system as more accurate than the other. They are oriented toward different problems. One preserves invariance; the other renders variation from a fixed position. One aligns with the way objects are ordinarily encountered; the other with the requirements of representing them on a plane. To judge the former by the standards of the latter is to misunderstand both.

The persistence and scope of this judgement are not difficult to observe. It is common to hear people say “I can’t draw,” when what they mean is something more specific: that they cannot draw in the particular way most often recognised and valued. Other competences—often perfectly well developed—go unacknowledged and remain quietly discouraged.

Over time, and now almost pervasively, this has become less a matter of technique than of language. Perspectival projection is not simply regarded as one method among others, but the measure against which drawing is evaluated and assessed. Its conventions are so widely embedded that it becomes difficult to see beyond them. None of this diminishes the value of observational drawing. It remains a powerful and highly refined means of working, capable of producing subtle and profoundly compelling results. But its elevated status as a specialised solution is easily lost from view. When it is taken to represent seeing as such, rather than one particular way of rendering what is seen, its scope is quietly extended beyond its proper domain.

What appears, at first, to be a matter of skill may be better understood as a matter of alignment—alignment with a set of conventions that have become pervasive. Once those conventions are recognised as such, it becomes possible to see alternatives that are coherent in their own terms, and responsive to different aspects of the world as it is encountered.

Blur in Focus

 

Clarity is something we appeal to readily. We speak of bringing things into focus, of sharpening an idea, of seeing clearly. The language suggests that thought and vision, when functioning properly, resolve into precision—that what is seen or conceived, if attended to correctly, presents itself without uncertainty or vagueness.

It is not always obvious when something is out of focus. Forms soften gradually; edges begin to merge without entirely disappearing, and what is seen can remain recognisable even as precision falls away. We adjust without noticing. Blur recedes into the background, like a low hum that gives no reason to be heard.

Blur rarely demands attention. It sits alongside clarity rather than in simple opposition to it, often passing without remark so long as things remain legible. It becomes most noticeable at its extremes, when an outline slips beyond recovery or when sharpness is expected but not achieved. For the most part, it is accommodated without being named.

In this sense, indeterminacy is not entirely foreign to vision. Consider, for example, the extreme edge of the visual field. It is difficult to say what colour it is, or even quite what is there at all. There is no object to attend to, no feature to isolate. The question begins to feel misplaced, as though it asks for something that is simply not there. We can gesture towards it, refer to it, perhaps even attempt to depict it, but only by borrowing from what can actually be seen. In this sense, it marks not so much a feature within vision as a point at which description runs out.

Blur, however, does not sit at those limits. It appears within the field of view itself, in how objects are seen, capable of being shared, and, crucially, made visible and repeatable. It is not beyond vision, but of it. Not an absence of seeing, but something internal and unavoidable in the workings of optics and vision.

From the earliest origins of vision, blur must always have existed. Any optical system that gathers light does so imperfectly. There is always a margin, a spread, a degree of imprecision in how things are brought toward focus. In that sense, blur is not an anomaly but a given. The difference is one of degree rather than of whether it occurs at all. Blur, in this sense, is a quiet reminder that perception is not seamless, but bounded by limits so ordinary that they rarely register, and often fall out of view entirely.

This helps explain why something so constant is rarely singled out as an object of sustained attention. It remains folded into the act of seeing, rather than separated from it, and so familiar, and so seemingly unhelpful to our pursuit of clarity, that it appears unlikely to yield anything of note. This begins to change once blur can be made visible in its own right—once it can be fixed within an image, stabilised, and examined. What was once fleeting and largely unremarked becomes available for inspection and comparison. This proves instructive because what might otherwise be taken as something private becomes open to scrutiny, losing whatever claim it might have had to inaccessibility.

In this respect, blur places pressure on certain ways of thinking about perception. The suggestion that what is seen might differ radically between individuals—despite all outward agreement—loses much of its force when applied here. Blur does not behave as an inscrutable private feature of experience. It can be adjusted, reduced, or intensified in ways that are publicly verifiable. What emerges is not a hidden divergence in experience, but a clearer sense of how variation in appearance depends upon the conditions under which things are seen, rather than upon any deeper instability in what is seen. We do not take the fuzziness of a finger held before the eye to indicate that it is dissolving, or that its boundaries are in question. We take it that it is exactly as our senses and expectations confirm, and that what varies is how it is seen.

To notice blur, then, is not to uncover a defect in the world, but to recognise something about the limits and conditions of seeing. The variability it introduces does not unsettle what we take for granted. If anything, it clarifies the distinction on which that certainty rests.

The variation in appearance does not undermine that certainty, but shows why it holds so firmly.

On Scale and its Disappearance

A ruler offers a promise. It fixes length, establishes proportion, provides a stable reference against which things can be measured. It anchors the abstract idea of size in something reliable and repeatable. Place it beside an object and a question is answered: how big is it?

That question now sits less securely than it once did.

Consider an image on a screen. A photograph viewed on a phone, a tablet, or a laptop can be enlarged, reduced, stretched to fill a window or shrunk to a thumbnail. Its dimensions change with a pinch or a swipe. Ask how large it is, and no clear answer presents itself. The question no longer attaches cleanly to the image. It depends on the device, the viewing conditions, the moment. This does not mean that scale has disappeared entirely. Screens have size. They display images at measurable dimensions. It is even possible, with some effort, to calibrate images on screen, to make them correspond to a chosen scale. I have, at various times, displayed ruler images along the edge of a laptop screen as an improvised tool, precisely scaled for that purpose. It works. But the fact that it might need to be done at all is telling.

Scale, in the context of screens, is no longer an intrinsic property of images. It does not arrive with them. It is imposed afterwards, managed, adjusted, or simply ignored. The image floats free of any fixed relation to the world of objects. It appears, but it does not declare how it is to be encountered. This marks a shift in the conditions under which images are made and seen.

There was a time, not so long ago, when photographs were usually encountered as physical objects. Prints had size, surface, weight. They occupied space. Their scale was not something to be adjusted in the moment of viewing but something that had been decided in advance. To make a photograph was, among other things, to decide how large it should be. That decision carried consequences. A small print demanded intimacy. A larger one altered the relation between image and body. 

Photobooks and monographs continue to preserve something of this condition. Images are printed at a fixed size, on a chosen surface, arranged within a sequence that determines how they are encountered. Even if compromises are made in production, the work has been tested, adjusted, and resolved within those constraints. The scale at which an image appears is not incidental. It forms part of how it is to be seen, and that is shared, more or less consistently, with the viewer. The image does not float free. It arrives with its dimensions already decided.

Students today often encounter photography under different conditions. Images are viewed on screens, circulated digitally, scaled at will. The question of size recedes. The image is encountered, but its relation to the viewer’s body is seldom fixed or even considered. One works not with objects but with sheer, sterilised appearances that can be resized without resistance. This can be convenient. It allows for rapid production, easy sharing, reduced material cost. But it also removes a set of decisions—about scale, surface and material presence. The work no longer determines its own scale and form in the same way. That determination is deferred to the device, the context, the moment of viewing.

Other media maintain a different relation to scale.

In sculpture, for example, scale is not an optional consideration. A three-dimensional object occupies space in direct proportion to its surroundings and to the human body. A figure modelled at eight inches in height is immediately understood in relation to the human form. It presents itself as scaled. It cannot avoid doing so. This has consequences for how such work is read. Small-scale sculpture, particularly when representational, is often received as a model rather than as a work in its own right. It suggests a larger object, a potential enlargement, a proposal rather than a conclusion. The scale invites that interpretation, whether intended or not. The work sits within a set of expectations more commonly associated with models and maquettes, where objects function more as intermediaries rather than as ends in themselves. A small figure suggests something larger. It appears provisional, preparatory, or subordinate to another, implied form or version. This relation need not be intended, but is difficult to avoid. Scale does the work quietly, before anything else has been established.

Pictorial media are different in this respect.

A photograph, drawing, or print routinely presents objects at multiple implied scales within a single image. Perspective distributes size. A figure may appear large or small depending on its position, not the size of the image itself. An eight-inch figure in a photograph is not taken to be an eight-inch figure. It is simply a figure, shown as it appears within the pictorial space.

The scale of the image and the scale of what it depicts are not the same thing. This difference has always been present. What has changed is the stability of the image as an object. When photographs were consistently encountered as prints, their scale and their material presence formed part of the experience. Now, increasingly, they are encountered as variable displays. Scale becomes fluid, contingent, and often unremarked. What has been lost is not scale itself, but the conditions that made it obvious, and moreover, significant.

In the pursuit of convenience, and in some respects sustainability, images have become easier to produce, circulate and view. They are less tied to specific materials, less constrained by fixed formats. But with that shift comes an attenuation of certain kinds of engagement and appreciation. Scale no longer anchors the image in relation to the body in the same way. It is available, but not insisted upon.

This is not simply a loss. It’s a change of emphasis. New possibilities emerge as others recede. There is a tendency, however, for what is gained in flexibility to be mistaken for neutrality or advantage. The absence of fixed scale can appear as a kind of freedom, when in fact it is another condition, one that shapes how images are encountered just as surely as any predetermined format.

Scale has not disappeared. It has become less visible and less available as a decision. And where it is not actively considered, it is quietly determined elsewhere.

For MT

On AI, Discovery, and the Already Known

Artificial intelligence now occupies a familiar place within creative practice. It can generate images, structure text, suggest forms, and produce variations at speed. It is increasingly used to draft, to illustrate, to test directions that might otherwise take time and labour. In that sense, it is already a useful tool. It removes certain frictions and obstacles. It makes certain kinds of work easier to do. That much is evident. What is less often examined is the kind of discovery such systems make possible, and the kind they do not.

There is a tendency to treat AI output as though it were generative in the fullest sense—as though it were capable of showing us things we had not seen before, of introducing genuinely new forms or ideas into the world. It can certainly surprise. It can produce unfamiliar combinations, unexpected arrangements, images that do not resemble anything one has previously encountered in quite that way. But that kind of novelty is not yet the same as discovery in the stronger sense. It is closer to the reconfiguration of what is already there. This distinction is easy to miss because, at the level of individual experience, the unfamiliar often feels like the new. An AI-generated image may present something that is new to us personally. It may prompt recognition, curiosity, even a sense of revelation. But that does not necessarily mean that anything has been discovered in a way that shifts understanding more broadly. The surprise lies in the encounter, not in the underlying structure.

The difference becomes clearer if one considers the role of error.

In artistic practice, errors are often not simply failures. They can be productive. A mark lands unexpectedly, a material behaves unpredictably, a process goes somewhat awry. Occasionally, something in that deviation presents itself as worth pursuing. The artist does not simply correct it. The deviation is taken up, followed, developed. What began as an accident becomes the basis for something else.

This is not guaranteed. Most errors remain just that. But the possibility matters. It introduces an openness into the process, a willingness to recognise significance where it was not initially intended.

This kind of recognition is not governed by rules alone. It depends on a sensitivity to what is at stake in the work, to what matters within the situation at hand. It is tied, however indirectly, to the same conditions that structure other forms of intelligent activity: the need to select, to pursue, to make use of what presents itself.

Artificial systems do not operate in that way. They can generate variations. They can produce deviations from a given pattern. But there is no equivalent moment in which a deviation is encountered as promising, as something that calls for further development on its own terms. There is no stake in the outcome, no sense in which one possibility matters more than another except insofar as that has already been specified.

The system produces. It does not pursue.

This is not a limitation of intelligence in any simple sense. It is a consequence of how such systems are situated. They do not exist within conditions that require them to make something of what they encounter. They do not depend on the success or failure of a decision in any lived way. Without that, the relation to novelty changes.

What is often described as creativity in this context is therefore better understood as recombination under constraint. That can be powerful, and it can be useful. It can expose connections, surface patterns, generate material that might serve as a starting point. But it does not amount to discovery in the sense that involves the recognition and pursuit of something that was not already circumscribed in advance. This is one reason why AI-generated imagery can feel limited as an artistic medium in its own right. It can produce convincing illustrations of what is already familiar. It can render scenes, styles and compositions with remarkable fluency. But it rarely compels in the way that work shaped through sustained engagement with a medium can. What it shows tends, in the end, to resolve into what is already known, however elaborately reassembled. 

That does not make it useless.

Used as a tool, AI can be valuable. It can assist in drafting, in testing ideas, in communicating an insight more clearly or efficiently than might otherwise be possible. It can remove some of the technical burdens that accompany making. In that respect, it sits alongside other devices and techniques—photography, tracing, projection—that have long extended what can be done without requiring mastery at every stage of production.
This raises a reasonable question. If an idea is genuinely insightful, does it matter how it is presented? Does the use of AI to articulate or illustrate that idea diminish its value?

Not necessarily. If the substance is there, clarity may well be an advantage. Indeed, it may reveal more accurately what is worth attending to. In some cases, the removal of material difficulty exposes a lack of substance more clearly. Where there is little to say, fluency becomes a kind of disguise. Where there is something to say, clarity can allow it to stand without distraction.

This cuts both ways.

The presence of fluency is no guarantee of insight. A well-formed essay or image may contain very little that compels attention, while something genuinely new may appear awkward, partial, or unresolved. The distinction is not always easy to make, but it matters. A musician is not necessarily a composer, and a composer need not be a virtuoso performer. Technical facility and clarity of presentation can refine what is there, but they do not in themselves produce it.

AI brings this into sharper focus. When coherence, fluency, and polish can be generated with ease, they become less reliable indicators of substance. What remains is the more difficult question of whether there is anything worth saying, or showing, in the first place. AI, by contrast, tends to strip away some of that density. What remains is often more direct, but also more exposed. The question of what is actually being said becomes harder to avoid. This is not an argument against the use of AI. It is an attempt to situate it more clearly. As a tool, it has a place. It can assist, accelerate, clarify. But it does not stand in for the conditions under which discovery, in the stronger sense, tends to occur.

Even if such moments are rare, the possibility of encountering something genuinely new remains a central motivation in much creative work. It shapes how artists attend to what they are doing, how they respond to what arises in the process. That possibility depends on more than the capacity to generate variation. It depends on the ability to recognise, and to pursue, what matters when it appears.

That is not something that can simply be automated.

For DM

Intelligence is Situated

Intelligence is not a property we possesses so much as a condition we inhabit.

It is not sealed within the skull, nor does it operate independently of circumstance. It is sustained, shaped, and made possible by an environment so pervasive that it disappears from view. What we call “intelligence” is inseparable from the ecological and material systems that support it -- air, gravity, temperature, infrastructure, language, tools, other people. Remove these, and intelligence does not diminish; it becomes irrelevant. Worse: it becomes useless.

The image of the mind as a self-contained engine persists because it flatters us. It suggests portability, autonomy, independence. But this is a fiction. Intelligence is not transferable in that way. A simple, almost crude example makes the point. Take any intelligent person and remove them completely from their environment. Put them somewhere where none of those conditions hold. A vacuum will do. Absolute darkness, no air, no pressure, nothing to stand on. Their intelligence doesn’t help them. It can’t. There is nothing for it to work on, nothing to engage with, nothing to sustain it. It isn’t that they fail to think well enough. Thinking itself no longer matters. So intelligence is not portable in the way we like to imagine. It does not detach cleanly from the conditions that sustain it. It belongs to a system.

That system, incidentally, is far more fragile than it appears. We are starting to see this now in ways that are harder to ignore. Small shifts in temperature, chemistry, biodiversity, things that once seemed minor or remote, turn out to have consequences that ripple through everything else. Not just for us but for all sorts of other organisms that are less adaptable, less robust, or perhaps just less fortunate.

Intelligence is often described as an adaptation, and that is right as far as it goes. But it is an adaptation to a very particular range of circumstances. It doesn’t generalise indefinitely. It works within a narrow band of conditions, and outside that band its usefulness fades quickly. We don’t tend to think in those terms. We talk about intelligence as though it were a kind of general-purpose capacity, something that could, given enough sophistication, solve anything. That idea starts to look doubtful when you remind yourself how dependent intelligence is on the specific environment in which it developed. This matters when people start talking about superintelligence. The assumption is usually that, if intelligence becomes sufficiently advanced, it might break free of these constraints. It might redesign its own environment. It might even create entirely new conditions for itself. In other words, it might escape the ecosystem that currently constrains it and wipe us out as a consequence.

That sounds both impressive and terrifying, but it slips something past you. It quietly assumes that intelligence comes first and environment follows. That the latter can be rearranged at will by the former. But intelligence, as we know it, doesn’t arrive first. It is already an outcome of a millennia-long process of adjustment, of adaptation, to an existing set of conditions. It emerges out of that process, it doesn’t stand outside it.

Even an artificial system would have to begin somewhere. It would require materials, energy, stability, a physical substrate of some kind. It would operate within constraints, even if those constraints looked very different from the ones we recognise. The idea of a system simply engineering a “niche” for itself skips over the fact that niches are not conjured out of nothing. They develop. They are shaped and enabled by what is already there.

There is another complication, which is usually left to one side. Intelligence, in any meaningful sense, is tied to need. Not abstract need, but quite specific pressures: to find, to avoid, to obtain, to maintain. These are not optional. They come with being alive. It’s worth being quite clear about this. Plenty of things persist. A building might survive a landslide. A stone might endure for centuries. But neither of those things has any stake in continuing to exist. They don’t act on their own behalf. Organisms don't invent reasons for their survival. Those reasons are inherited. They are part of a larger pattern. The individual is an instance of that pattern, not its origin.

Artificial systems complicate this picture in a revealing way. They are, in the first instance, tools. Their purposes are not their own; they are assigned. They do not act on their own behalf but on ours, or on behalf of whatever system deploys them. In that sense they have functions but not needs. They continue to operate only insofar as something else requires them to, maintains them, powers them. If one wanted to imagine such a system becoming “intelligent” in a way that resembles the situated intelligence described here, it would not be enough for it to become more complex or more capable. It would have to acquire purposes of its own. It would have to cease to exist merely for something else. That would not just be an increase in intelligence. It would be a fundamental transformation.

That has significant consequences for how we think about intelligence. If intelligence arises in response to need, and if need arises within living systems, then intelligence is bound up with those systems in a deep and inextricable way. It is not just a problem-solving ability. It is tied to survival, to continuation, to the ongoing negotiation of conditions that allow something to keep going at all. Take that away, and something changes. You might still have systems that process information, that optimise, that respond in complex ways and that pose real risks to life. But it becomes less clear in what sense they are “situated” in the same way. Less clear what, if anything, is at stake for them or “it”.

There is a tendency to whitewash here, to assume that more complexity simply means more intelligence. But that misses something important. Intelligence, at least as we encounter it in the world, as we always encounter it, is not just about complexity. It is about dependency. About being caught up in a set of conditions that you don’t control and can’t step outside. That idea is not especially comfortable. It cuts against the picture of intelligence as something sovereign, something self-sufficient. But the alternative picture, that intelligence can outstrip the very conditions that make it possible, starts to look less convincing.

To say that intelligence is situated is therefore not simply to observe that it occurs somewhere. It is to recognise that it is constituted by that “somewhere”, that it cannot be abstracted from it without distortion. Intelligence does not stand over and against its environment. It is a function of it. And until that relationship is properly understood, intelligence will continue to be mistakenly imagined as something it is not: a detachable capacity, a transferable asset, a power that can outstrip the very conditions that make it possible.

 

For RW