Love & Passion Quote by John Desmond Bernal

Bernal is peering past the cozy human tendency to treat intelligence as a linear upgrade of ourselves. He sketches a three-way gap: the “complex mind,” the “simple, mechanized mind,” and “ours.” That triangulation matters. It refuses the usual sci-fi comfort that a machine mind will be either a superhuman version of human psychology or a calculator with legs. Instead, Bernal implies a psychology so alien it might be as far from a crude automaton as it is from us. The provocation is tucked into his scale of difference: complexity doesn’t just add abilities; it warps motives, perception, and the very categories we use to describe inner life.

The line lands hardest at the end, where he smuggles in a taboo comparator: “something… greater than sex.” In early 20th-century intellectual culture, sex was shorthand for the deep engine of behavior - Freud’s gravitational center. Bernal isn’t being salacious; he’s signaling that whatever organizes a truly complex intelligence may be anchored in drives as fundamental as reproduction is to humans, yet not reducible to it. Subtext: stop projecting romance, rivalry, ego, or libido onto minds that may be structured around entirely different imperatives (survival in new substrates, expansion, information hunger, collective coordination).

Contextually, Bernal sits at the intersection of scientific modernism and speculative futurism: a scientist thinking in cosmic time, when “mechanized mind” suggested both industrial automation and the early dream (or dread) of artificial intelligence. The sentence reads like a warning label for anthropomorphism - and a dare to imagine motivation without familiar instincts.