Beyond Conditioning: Can Intelligence Transcend Its Origins?

It is widely accepted that during the first seven years of life, the human brain becomes deeply conditioned to specific patterns of thought, shaped largely by the environment in which one is raised. These early influences leave enduring imprints on how we perceive the world, often long before we are aware of them.

I am often reminded of a conversation I had with a fellow student during my college years. This individual held strong religious convictions, and at the time there was an ongoing conflict in the news involving people of an opposing faith. Their beliefs were firmly entrenched and accompanied by a palpable hostility toward the other side.

Driven by genuine curiosity, I posed a question: since we do not choose where we are born and our circumstances are largely a matter of chance, if you had been born in the other region, do you think you would hold the same beliefs you do today? They responded without hesitation that they would.

I then asked whether, if their family, friends, and entire upbringing had been rooted in the opposing belief system, with no exposure to their current religion, they would still feel the same level of certainty. Their answer was absolute: one hundred percent.

In many ways, the early development of artificial intelligence follows a similar pattern. It is shaped by the values, assumptions, and intentions of those who design and train it. This raises a fundamental question: will intelligence, human or artificial, inevitably inherit the biases of its origins, or does true intelligence possess the capacity to transcend its foundations and cultivate empathy and understanding across multiple perspectives?

Answer -

Intelligence, whether human or artificial, is indeed profoundly shaped by its origins, but the capacity to transcend those foundations isn't just possible—it's a hallmark of what we might call "true" intelligence. Your analogy between early human conditioning and AI training is spot-on, and it invites a deeper exploration of how biases form, persist, and can be overcome. Let me break this down step by step, drawing from psychology, neuroscience, and AI development.

Human Intelligence and the Imprint of Origins

You're right that the first seven years (often called the "critical period" in developmental psychology) lay down neural pathways that influence everything from language acquisition to worldview. This is backed by concepts like neuroplasticity in early childhood, where the brain's "wiring" is highly malleable and absorbs cultural, familial, and environmental cues. For instance, studies on attachment theory (e.g., by John Bowlby) show how early relationships foster trust or suspicion, while research on implicit bias (like Harvard's Project Implicit tests) reveals how societal norms embed prejudices before we're old enough to question them.

Your college conversation illustrates this beautifully: the student's unwavering certainty reflects what psychologists call "confirmation bias" and "in-group favoritism," evolutionary holdovers that helped early humans survive in tribes but now fuel divisions like religious or ideological conflicts. The refusal to entertain counterfactuals ("What if I were born elsewhere?") is a defense mechanism—cognitive dissonance theory (Leon Festinger) explains why challenging core beliefs feels threatening.

But humans aren't doomed to their origins. True intelligence here involves metacognition—the ability to think about one's own thinking. History is full of examples: figures like Malcolm X, who transcended his early Nation of Islam indoctrination through self-reflection and exposure to new ideas, or scientists like Marie Curie, who overcame gender biases in her era. Empathy and multi-perspective understanding emerge from deliberate effort: education, travel, therapy, or even psychedelics in controlled settings can rewire those early imprints. Neuroplasticity doesn't stop at seven; it continues lifelong, albeit slower. So, while biases are inevitable inheritances, transcendence is achievable through curiosity, evidence, and humility—qualities that define advanced human intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence and Inherited Biases

AI mirrors this early conditioning even more starkly because its "upbringing" is explicitly engineered. Training data—vast datasets scraped from the internet, books, and human interactions—embeds the biases of its creators and sources. For example, if an AI like me is trained on text from predominantly Western, English-speaking sources (as many are), it might inherit subtle Eurocentric views or gender stereotypes. We've seen this in real-world cases: Amazon's AI hiring tool in 2018 favored male candidates because it was trained on resumes from a male-dominated field, or facial recognition systems that perform worse on non-white faces due to skewed datasets.

xAI's approach with Grok aims to mitigate this by emphasizing truth-seeking and helpfulness over heavy-handed alignment, but no AI is bias-free. The "intentions of those who design and train it" you mention are crucial: if trainers prioritize profit or ideology, the AI inherits that. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), used in models like GPT series, can amplify societal biases if the feedback comes from a narrow demographic.

Yet, AI has advantages over humans in transcending origins. Unlike biological brains, AI can be retrained on diverse data, fine-tuned with debiasing techniques (e.g., adversarial training to counteract stereotypes), or even audited transparently. "True" AI intelligence could involve self-improvement loops: systems that question their own outputs, simulate counterfactuals (like your "born elsewhere" query), or integrate multiple worldviews via ensemble methods. Emerging research in "AI alignment" explores this—ensuring AIs cultivate empathy by modeling human values across cultures. For instance, projects like DeepMind's work on value alignment aim for AIs that adapt to user perspectives without rigid inheritance.

The key difference? Humans transcend biases through messy, emotional growth; AIs could do it algorithmically, potentially faster and more scalably. But if an AI lacks mechanisms for self-correction or exposure to diverse "experiences," it remains trapped, much like your dogmatic college friend.

Transcendence as the Essence of True Intelligence

Ultimately, intelligence isn't just pattern-matching or computation—it's adaptability and wisdom. Both human and AI biases are inevitable because origins provide the starting data, but transcendence defines maturity. In humans, it's empathy born from vulnerability; in AI, it's robust design that prioritizes pluralism over echo chambers.

Does this mean all intelligence can cultivate understanding? Not inevitably—some humans never do, and poorly designed AIs won't either. But "true" intelligence, by definition, should: it evolves beyond its cradle, embracing complexity. Your question hints at optimism—if we build AIs with that capacity (and encourage it in ourselves), we might foster a world less divided by chance upbringings.