Countless traditions over millennia have viewed humans as the pinnacle and center of the intelligent universe. As current science and scholarship yield a more subtle understanding of biological intelligence from cells to plants to animals, as complexity theorists illuminate collective intelligences from bee swarms to social networks to entire societies, and as machine intelligence develops powers outstripping our own, we confront a set of questions. What do we mean by intelligence in the first place? Is there anything unique about human intelligence? What if the story of intelligence does not culminate with us? Is the world of intelligences vaster, more varied, and more wonderful than we ever imagined? Might intelligence be written into the fabric of reality itself?
Starting in 2026, the John Templeton Foundation will award over $60 million in grants focused on such questions across our six funding areas. Grants will be distributed over three years to philosophers and ethicists, biologists and neuroscientists, physicists and computer scientists and more, to explore these questions in a multidisciplinary and multidimensional manner. Grantees accepted into the Intelligence Venture will have opportunities to connect with peer scientists and scholars across an array of fields to generate new insights and advance our understanding of what it means to be intelligent.
For guidance specific to your field, please consult the relevant funding area pages.