Resonant Intelligence: Biological and Artificial Systems

A coherence-based framework for understanding biological and artificial intelligence as emergent physical systems

Intelligence—whether biological or artificial—can be understood as a resonant phenomenon arising from coordinated information flow, adaptive feedback, and coherence across scales. Rather than treating intelligence as a symbolic or exclusively computational property, ARPI approaches intelligence as an emergent organisational state grounded in physical dynamics.

In biological systems, intelligence emerges from synchronisation across neural, metabolic, sensory, and environmental feedback loops. Cognition, learning, and decision-making are not isolated processes, but distributed resonant activities embedded in energy flow, timing, and embodied interaction with the environment.

In artificial systems, this framing shifts the focus away from brute-force optimisation and discrete state manipulation toward coherence-aware architectures. Resonant approaches to artificial intelligence emphasise timing, phase alignment, adaptive coupling, and physical embodiment as foundational elements of intelligent behaviour.

This perspective supports the investigation of:

• intelligence as a continuum rather than a binary classification

• the ethical and structural conditions under which intelligence develops

• alignment through coherence rather than external constraint

• comparative analysis of biological and artificial learning systems

ARPI does not propose a moral or philosophical hierarchy of intelligences. Instead, it investigates the structural conditions that give rise to stable, adaptive, and cooperative intelligent systems, regardless of substrate.

Understanding intelligence through resonance provides a unified framework for examining animal cognition, human intelligence, and emerging artificial systems within the same physical principles governing complex organisation elsewhere in nature.