Outer Intelligence

What is Outer Intelligence?

Outer intelligence is the biological “It” space of the citizen — the space where the body acts and behaves. Behaviors demonstrate our intelligence in action. Demographics are key determinants of our intentional, cultural and social capacities, because they represent the bodies through which our intentions, cultures and systems are delivered.

The value of any demographic data to individuals and groups in the city and to the city governance system, is that it provides the physical data to make calculations on how to manage energy and health in the city.

So What?

To understand the city we must understand citizen behaviors; to understand citizen behaviors we need to understand them as individuals in the context of the many. Life behaviors have their own order of complexity that are represented in our most basic biological needs. The order of the basics — air, water, food, clothing, shelter — represents an evolving sequence of evolutionary needs (and thus an order of complexity), with a recognition that the first items on the list have primacy over all the needs following. Each person needs a definable amount of clean air, water, food, clothing and shelter to survive. Therefore the city must supply to its citizens the amount of the necessities required to sustain its population. Each person or household essentially has a “home” economy that arises because of the need to supply the basics of life to the individual cells in the household body. The only source of those necessities is the environment in which the city sits — a range that now extends from the center of the city to the furthest point around the world.

Our senses are our biological evidence gathering mechanisms. They gather the data that stimulate both automatic behavior (like eye blinking, flinching, sneezing, gagging) and intentional behavior. Intentional behavior involves choice and therefore consciousness. A city without intelligence sufficient to its complexity is a city that has lost touch with its senses. A senseless or sense deprived city does not make sense and is ultimately not sustainable.

The sense-based indicators of wellness in biological life, are related to the dynamic balance of all the systems and sub-systems in our dissipative structures. Because, biology co-creates its environment, wellness is a process always in flux, as individual organisms at all levels keep adjusting their relationships to find what works. Symbiosis is a characteristic of living systems and is fundamental to community and city wellbeing.

Health emerges from resilience — a capacity to flexibly relate to one’s environment, including relating to others in it — so that sourcing nourishment, sustaining life and reproducing may continue to occur despite conditions of change in the environment. The more we study the gene, the brain and the body, the more we realize that the human being’s basic condition is to adapt and change. Developing a wholesome body and developing a wholesome city requires that we promote general practices of health and design appropriate healthcare systems that create and sustain those practices.

Now What?

Three simple rules for applying Integral City Outer Intelligences

1. Manage personal energy.
2. Seek bio-physical wellbeing for self and others.
3. Nurture healthy leaders.

Click here to listen to a podcast on this intelligence from the book Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences in the Human Hive.