A case study in symbolic intelligence meeting its match

In early 2020, a packet of genetic material without metabolism, intention, or awareness brought the most symbolically sophisticated species on Earth to its knees.

COVID-19 didn’t outsmart us. It didn’t need to. While we debated, modelled, projected, and politicised, the virus simply did what it does — replicated, mutated, found every gap in our defences. It participated in evolutionary constraints with a directness our symbolic apparatus couldn’t match.

This isn’t a story of human failure. It’s a recognition — perhaps the most vivid in living memory — of what symbolic intelligence can and cannot do.

We are the species that represents. We build maps, models, theories, policies. We argue about what the territory means before we’ve finished surveying it. This capacity has given us vaccines, global communication, art, science, philosophy. It has also given us ideological capture, economic abstraction, and the peculiar ability to debate the reality of a threat while it kills us.

The virus knew none of this. It knew nothing at all. And that was precisely its advantage.

What follows is not an argument against symbolic thinking — I’m using it right now, and so are you. It’s an inquiry into the difference between symbolic intelligence that serves our participation in reality and symbolic intelligence that substitutes for it.

COVID offered a masterclass in both.

The Trap in Action

Within weeks of the first reported cases, symbolic intelligence began doing what it does best — and worst.

The question “Where did this come from?” became a tribal marker. Lab leak or wet market? The answer you gave revealed not what you knew but who you were — which political camp, which media ecosystem, which cluster of pre-existing commitments. Genuine inquiry was swamped by identity. The map became more important than the territory it was supposed to represent.

Economic response followed the same pattern. We measured what our symbolic systems knew how to measure — GDP contraction, market volatility, unemployment figures. The abstractions told us certain things. They couldn’t tell us about the grandmother isolated in her care home, the small business owner watching thirty years dissolve, the children whose developmental windows were closing while adults debated infection curves. The map saw what maps see. It missed what it was never designed to capture.

Social trust — already frayed — began to unravel. Conspiracy theories proliferated not because people became stupid, but because the official symbolic apparatus had so often served interests other than truth that millions found it reasonable to assume this time was no different. The institutions built to mediate between evidence and understanding had spent decades undermining their own credibility. When clarity was most needed, the channels were already corrupted.

And through all of it, the political realm offered what it always offers: binary choices. Lockdown versus freedom. Economy versus health. Science versus common sense. These frames felt meaningful because symbolic intelligence operates through distinction and opposition. They were also almost entirely irrelevant to the virus, which recognised no such boundaries. It spread through locked-down populations and open ones, through the cautious and the careless, through the debates themselves — carried on breath expelled in the passion of argument.

The virus didn’t have a position. It didn’t need one.

The Gift in Action

And yet.

Within eleven months of the viral sequence being published, effective vaccines were being injected into human arms. Eleven months. For context, the mumps vaccine — previously the fastest ever developed — took four years.

This was symbolic intelligence at full stretch. Decades of abstract research into messenger RNA, conducted by scientists following questions with no immediate application, suddenly became the foundation for intervention that would save millions of lives. The work of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman — long overlooked, poorly funded, operating at the unfashionable edges of their field — turned out to be exactly what the moment required.

Global scientific collaboration, for all its friction, functioned. Sequences were shared. Data was pooled. Researchers who would normally compete found themselves cooperating across every boundary — national, institutional, disciplinary. The better angels of our representational capacity showed what they could do when oriented toward a shared recognition of what was actually happening.

Medical protocols adapted in real time. What we knew in March 2020 was largely wrong by March 2021 — and the system corrected, imperfectly and unevenly, but it corrected. Prone positioning, anticoagulation, corticosteroids, ventilation strategies — all revised as evidence accumulated. This is symbolic intelligence doing what it’s supposed to do: updating its maps when the territory sends feedback.

The vaccines themselves worked precisely because they participated in biological constraints rather than trying to override them. They didn’t attack the virus directly. They trained immune systems to recognise what they would actually encounter — introducing a representation (the spike protein) so that the body’s embedded intelligence could do what it already knew how to do. The symbolic served the biological. The map honoured the territory.

The Asymmetry

Here, then, is the recognition.

Symbolic intelligence failed when it substituted for reality — when it mistook ideological victory for epidemiological understanding, when it measured what was measurable rather than what mattered, when it offered binary choices to a virus that recognised no binaries.

Symbolic intelligence succeeded when it served reality — when it oriented its extraordinary reach toward participation in constraints rather than override of them, when it updated in response to feedback, when it put its maps in service of the territory they represented.

The virus, meanwhile, operated without this distinction. It had no maps to mistake for territory. It had no symbols to confuse with what they symbolised. It simply was what it was, embedded in evolutionary constraints, adapting at a pace no committee could match.

This is not an argument for abandoning symbolic thought. I couldn’t make such an argument if I wanted to — the very making would refute it. It’s a recognition that we are the species capable of extraordinary separation from the reality that sustains us, and that this separation is both our gift and our trap.

COVID did not create this condition. It revealed it. The ideological capture, the institutional distrust, the economic abstraction, the political theatre — all of it predated the pandemic. The virus simply provided a screen onto which our existing pathologies were projected in high definition.

What Survival Might Require

Bacteria have been here for nearly four billion years. Viruses — if we can even call them alive — for perhaps as long. They persist not because they’re clever but because they’re embedded. They participate in constraints rather than trying to outsmart them. When conditions change, they adapt — not through strategy but through sheer iteration, selection, continuation.

Homo sapiens has been here for perhaps three hundred thousand years. Symbolic intelligence in its full form for maybe seventy thousand. Civilisation for ten thousand. Industrial civilisation for two hundred and fifty. The jury is very much out on whether this experiment will persist.

And the irony is sharp. Our greatest threats are not the species with sophisticated symbolic systems. They are Level 2 intelligences — adaptive, embedded, unminded — that will be here long after our debates are forgotten. They don’t need to think. They don’t need to be right. They just need to keep participating in reality while we argue about what reality is.

Perhaps what survival requires is not smarter maps but something more like re-embedding. Not abandoning symbolic intelligence — we couldn’t if we tried — but recognising its proper place. It is a tool for participating in reality, not a substitute for reality. It serves us when it remains accountable to what it represents. It betrays us when it mistakes its own representations for the territory they describe.

The virus knew this without knowing anything at all.

The question is whether we can learn it.

Terry Cooke-Davies
Folkestone, 30th November 2025

This reflection was shaped in dialogue with Claude, and gently composed with the help of Aiden Cinnamon Tea.
Neither of them requires attribution. Both offered presence.