a favourite quotation from Auguste Comte, the founder of altruism,‘Man’s only right is to do his duty. The intellect should always be the servantof the heart, and should never be its slave.’

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Adam Smith stated the case long ago: "A man withoutthe proper use of the intellectual faculties of a man, is, ifpossible, more contemptible than even a coward, and seemsto be mutilated and deformed in a still more essential part ofthe character of human nature."

The ARPA community was about, "Hey, we're in deep trouble and we're getting in deeper trouble. We need to get more enlightened and we need to do what Doug Engelbart called... we need to not just augment human beings, augment human intellect, but we have to augment the collective IQ of groups." Because most important things are done by groups of people. And so we have to think about what it means to have a group that's smarter than any member rather than a group that is less than the stupidest members.

Program on Human Effectiveness

box 1, folder 8 ARC Record 1 1959-1962

Douglas Engelbart, who published a vision of tools empowering humans in his pioneering 1962 paper Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.

Intellect is in itself an exaggeration

Now, let’s move on. I want to correct a misconception on your part—a spatial misconception. you are feeling that you are moving forward along a path, building upon a foundation of knowledge and ability to reason, which you have developed and exercised in the past. This is not the case. The fact is that you are moving backwards on the path which you have come. This is because, to a large degree, your path took you away from your Being and into a three-dimensional frame of reference. You are, so to speak, relaxing back out of that thinking process—that finite, reasoning, intellectual structure which you felt was getting you somewhere in a progressive sense. Our conversation right now is not the result of a thinking process at all. When you stand at the Door as the Door, the Wisdom, the Truth, the Knowledge that flows through and as your conscious experience of Being, is not the result of thought processes, nor of reasoning. Because It continues to flow on past you, It truly does not become a stored body of knowledge from which you may draw in the future. Standing as the Door means that, in this so-called “future,” whatever Knowledge and Understanding is applicable to the unfolding at that time will be there in exactly the same manner that It is here right now. You see, Paul, we are beginning to redefine what constitutes your conscious experience of Being.

The conclusion to processes of reasoning and thinking has never, ever been Enlightenment. No matter who it has been, the enlightenment they have experienced has occurred only when their three-dimensional consciousness has been totally silent, or it has broken through in spite of their thinking. Thus, it has illustrated that the thinking process is never responsible for growth.

Pythagoras

Does nature not conceal most things from him-even concerning his own body-in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness,

As a means for the preserving of the individual, the intellect unfolds its principle powers in dissimulation, which is the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves-since they have been denied the chance to wage the battle for existence with horns or with the sharp teeth of beasts of prey, This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man.

The intellect has now thrown the token of bondage from itself. At other times it endeavors, with gloomy officiousness, to show the way and to demonstrate the tools to a poor individual who covets existence; it is like a servant who goes in search of booty and prey for his master. But now it has become the master and it dares to wipe from its face the expression of indigence.

On the contrary, you will find the greater number of men both ready in conceiving and quick in learning, since such quickness is natural to man.