Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Bearer of Intelligence

4 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Intelligenzträger

A bearer of intelligence is a being that can perform acts of intelligence. The question who or what can be a bearer is not to be answered by functional performance alone — it is an ontological question about the constitution of the bearer.

The personalist ontology distinguishes seven classes of bearers of intelligence according to substance-constitution:

Substantial Bearers

Beings with their own substance (German) and their own faculty actualized through acts:

  • Human bearers — person as rational substance in the body (German); every person (German) is a human bearer of intelligence.
  • Animal bearers — octopus, corvids, dog, primates. Faculty without propositional capacity for truth from a first-person perspective.
  • Cellular bearers — slime mould (Physarum polycephalum), bacterial colony, plant. Bioelectric cognitive substrates.

Emergent Bearers

Swarm, beehive, market, internet hive-mind. Intelligence of the collective without single substantial bearer. Disjoint from person (German), because no individual substantial unity is present.

Hybrid Bearers

Human plus BCI (brain-computer interface, Neuralink, Synchron Stentrode). Human plus LLM augmentation. Substance-ontologically the human remains person (German); what changes is the mode of actualization (second actuality / German), not the essence-form (first actuality / German).

Artificial Bearers

Artificial Intelligence (German) — Large Language Models, embodied AI. Functionally intelligent without thereby being decided about substance. No truth-apt act from a first-person perspective — and therefore none of the four personal faculties (understanding, ethical judgement, responsibility, affective value-response) that categorically require a substantial bearer.

Ontologically Uncertain Bearers

Brain organoids (DishBrain, Smirnova), advanced LLMs, synthetic embryo models (German). Cases in which the question substance or function? is open. Deliberately no hard separation from person (German), analogous to the modeling of synthetic embryo models (in dubio pro persona).

Methodological Pointe

The differentiation prevents two category mistakes:

  1. Reduction to function — whoever defines bearer of intelligence by behavioural performance can declare LLMs or swarms to be persons without ontological evidence.
  2. Premature denial — whoever excludes ontologically uncertain cases (organoid, advanced LLM) without differentiation risks exactly the error that personalist ontology criticizes in Singer.

The classification keeps both risks visible by making the openness of personhood-status a category of its own.

Ontological Classification

  • is superclass of: Ontologically Uncertain Bearer of Intelligence
  • further subclasses: substantial / animal / cellular / emergent / hybrid / artificial bearer
  • with substantially-human: every person (German) is a human bearer of intelligence; not vice versa, because the bearer requires the faculty, not the performance

Sources (recension date 25 April 2026).

Further sources:

  • Spaemann, Robert (2006): Persons. The Difference between “Someone” and “Something”. Translated by Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Boethius: Contra Eutychen et Nestorium (Liber de persona et duabus naturis), c. III: naturae rationabilis individua substantia. Edition: H. F. Stewart et al., Loeb 74, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1973.
  • Wojtyła, Karol (1979): The Acting Person. Translated by Andrzej Potocki. Dordrecht: Reidel (orig. Osoba i czyn, 1969).
  • de Waal, Frans (2016): Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? New York: Norton.
  • Andrews, Kristin (2020): The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
  • Levin, Michael & Dennett, Daniel (2020): Cognition all the way down. Aeon, 13 October 2020.
  • Levin, Michael (2024): Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue. Entropy 26(6): 481.
  • Godfrey-Smith, Peter (2016): Other Minds. The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
  • Godfrey-Smith, Peter (2020): Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
  • Seeley, Thomas D. (2010): Honeybee Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Couzin, Iain D. (2009): Collective cognition in animal groups. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13(1): 36 – 43.
  • Gordon, Deborah M. (2010): Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior. Princeton University Press.
  • Hauser, Marc D., Chomsky, Noam & Fitch, W. Tecumseh (2002): The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve? Science 298: 1569 – 1579. DOI: 10.1126/science.298.5598.1569.
  • Tomasello, Michael (2019): Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Carruthers, Peter (2008): Meta-cognition in animals: a skeptical look. Mind & Language 23(1): 58 – 89.
  • Frith, Chris D. (2012): The role of metacognition in human social interactions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 367: 2213 – 2223.

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