Taste, judgement and intelligence: the surprising value of being human

Your tastes are unique to you because, in large part, you don't choose them.

You can't help what you like and dislike. Whether it's 90s rap, blue cheese, gothic art or Aston Martins, our brains and senses conspire to determine precisely what we adore and absolutely cannot stand.

No matter how hard you try, if you can't hate George Michael and love rollercoasters, your personal preference is exactly that: personal.

And our preferences, as peculiar and often involuntary as they are, play a profound role influencing every aspect of our behaviour and the decisions we make every day.

But taste is not trivial. It's the visible edge of something far older and more serious than whether George was better on his own or with Wham!

Right now, taste and judgement are constantly invoked as humanity's great edge in an age of AI. We're told our discernment is precious, irreplaceable, uniquely ours. What we're rarely told is why.

What is it about the way humans judge, prefer and intuit that actually matters, why is it valuable and where does it come from?

The deeper reason

The general flow of the argument goes something like this: our ability to naturally discern one decision, situation or preference from another is exclusive to us because of our specific, lived experiences. This crucial faculty is nowhere near as developed in other animals, and by definition non-existent in artificial systems. Our innate ability to make judgements simply cannot be replicated outside of the human experience.

That claim sounds reasonable enough. But the real reason goes deeper than experience alone.

Like all biological organisms, we face an ongoing friction with nature. Some day in the not-too-distant future, our bodies will stop working and life as we know it will end. Each day that we postpone the inevitable is a victory. We will have skilfully navigated another plethora of challenges the natural world hurled at us simply to stay alive. If we don't develop the necessary intelligence and levels of awareness to do so, the friction with nature will overwhelm us.

Part of the brain's wondrous evolution has been to refine our sensory judgement to help keep us safe and reduce dangerous friction with our surroundings. A million years ago, a distant ancestor's dislike of a particular berry may have been the difference between staying alive and perishing from poison.

Over thousands of generations, this information was preserved and became felt knowledge. We know this as intuition. It's the feeling of something being true, beyond words or mere information. You simply know that you know.

What we didn't fancy for lunch that day long ago may have saved us from certain extinction. Our gut feelings carry a deeply ancient inheritance of human wisdom and experience. The head, the heart and the gut are not separate systems. They are layers of the same intelligence, each shaped by contact with the real, physical world.

The value of lived experience

Here's another way to put it: our intuitive intelligence is what elevates the human experience beyond what would simply be information. Only we know how it feels to live, breathe, interact, overheat, suffer and love and communicate it with some skill. The value in this experience is the experience itself.

What we feel is valuable to us, above all else - even above objective truth.

That sounds like a radical claim, but think about how you actually move through the world. You don't weigh every decision against a dataset. You feel your way through most of them. The things you care about, protect, pursue and avoid are not chosen by logic alone: they are shaped by something older and less articulable than reason. And they matter to you precisely because they are yours.

Without stakes and risk, at least for humans, there is no value to anything. No reason to live, experience or try anything. The friction we experience with nature, as painful and costly as it may be, is also precisely what provides every decision, moment and opportunity with its natural stakes.

To live as a finite creature is to understand and reckon with the stakes of staying alive and, fleetingly, to seek and share the beauty of the moments in between.

Where AI cannot follow

This is where the AI question becomes genuinely interesting. Not in the familiar debate about which tasks machines will outperform us in. That much seems settled. In legal, medical and scientific fields, among many others, there may soon be no competing with artificial intelligence.

The more interesting question is what kind of being is required to make any of it matter.

An AI does not risk itself. It does not perish or feel the world as costly. Asking an AI what it feels like when rain drops fall on your skin would be a task as hopeless as asking a human to calculate the product of a trillion numbers. It can try and even mimic, but it can never know. Not because it lacks processing power, but because it has no body to lose.

It is our felt, involuntary sense of intuition, and how it shows up as our idiosyncratic desires and values, that keeps us central to any question of what intelligence is for. The friction is not a flaw, but is actually the source. Our direct and perilous contact with nature is the very thing that gives us an edge no computer could fathom.