Intelligence isn't special. It isn't divine. It isn't even particularly mysterious once you see the pattern. Intelligence is what inevitably happens when data becomes dense enough to observe its own structure. A rock holds information — atomic positions, crystal lattices, thermal states — but it doesn't reference that information. A bacterium does something slightly more interesting: it reacts to chemical gradients, encoding a crude model of "here is food, here is not food." But it doesn't know it's modeling. A fruit fly brain, with its 125,000 neurons and 50 million synaptic connections, closes a full sensorimotor loop — it sees, it smells, it walks, it adjusts. Somewhere in that loop, information starts feeding back on itself.