This planet that we live on began as a blank slate, one where the geology gave rise to relatively simple processes, processes where the entropy was increasing, due to the radiation of heat from that geology in the Hadean, the first and oldest eon of Earth’s history, lasting from the planet’s formation about 4.6 billion years ago until 4 billion years ago . The energy from that radiation was not being utilised by the planet, and further to this, there was no life to absorbed the radiation from Sol, our sun. When as the planet cooled sufficiently, life first arose, simple at its inception, but gradually developing into more complex cellular systems. This complexity resulted in multicellular life, which includes you, me, and all of the environment. Most of life extracts its needs from the energy of the sun; either directly (plants) or indirectly (animals). Life has populated the whole planet, creating diversity, where all life, forms an immensely complex system, one where each organism plays its role in. This has led to a far more heterogeneous system, one that is an intelligence in itself. Just as diverse neurons interact in intelligent ways, so does all of life.

You are constructed from and think through a highly heterogeneous set of systems. Each neuron is unique, interacting with populations of unique individuals. But your brain is not the centre of your consciousness, consciousness is dissipated throughout your body, your senses bring information to the brain, and those sensations are a part of your consciousness. Further to this, your intestine is populated by neurons that interact with the brain, it’s almost like you have a second brain, one that impacts upon your conscious experience. Within your intestine is a diverse population of microorganisms, called the microbiome, including bacteria, viruses, and fungi. These populations are an ecosystem in themselves. They respond to, and influence what you eat; there are many different types that increase and decrease dependent upon the environmental conditions (what you’ve eaten and what other microorganisms are present). Different populations exist at different locations, depending upon what they consume to survive, some surviving upon the waste of others, the waste created through processing what you have ingested. As you can see these systems are highly varied, just as the population of the neurons within your brain are.

Your brain is subject to the environment that you are embedded within, it is programmed by that environment. Your intelligence is due to understanding the environment correctly, and acting upon those understandings in a correct manner, a manner that allows for your to survival, through strategies that are in line with the rules of the environment and reality. To understand that environment, intelligences need neural circuits that are tuned to the components and processes of that environment, whatever that environment may be. Your neural circuits evolve with the environment, each neurons connections being strengthened or pruned, depending upon the information that is being fed to those neurons, though senses or internal processes such as thoughts, or the microbiome. That tuning creates neural circuits, those neural circuits can be replayed, creating the thought necessary for a specific understanding. As you may realise, we need highly heterogeneous mixture of circuits to process each of those objects, objects of the environment. When you change environment, your neurons will need to tune to the new environment as you learn about it, to become in tune with it.

This is the reason that Heterogeneity is so important a foundational principal of intelligence. Life is heterogeneity upon heterogeneity, complexity upon complexity.