**1. Introduction**

Our world is composed of particulars, matters that have extension such as dimension, weight and form. Our lives are also composed of universals, abstractions regarding relative matters such as position and value. Particulars are compulsory to conceptualize when describing the world, universals are indispensable when making particulars and other universals meaningful. Our world exists for us as far as we live, and we live as far as we produce meanings.

Our understanding of the world is constantly deepening due to scientific progress, but the meaning of our lives is not a matter of accumulating knowledge. Every generation and every individual have to work out that for themselves.

Ambient intelligence is a phenomenon that can be described and it is also a carrier of meanings. As rhetoric would advise, the best argument is the inevitable. By skillful descriptions, rhetoric aims are pursued and those subjected to skillful talk eventually think they have figured out everything by themselves. In the pursuit of a critical understanding, conceptual analyses are needed.

Here, an attempt is made to conceptualize contexts that are meaningful for understanding ambient intelligence and the ways we understand it. Intelligence is often associated with the act of optimizing, which in its turn seems to be connected to the broader concept of rational action. Rationality is, however, a function of the context where rational action takes place. The context of rational action has its own rationale, which defines rationality.

Ambient intelligence concerns ambience, and ways we conceive it. In preindustrial built environments, the physical context caused intelligible ambience to emerge. In the industrialized world of constant flux, intelligible and stable conditions are replaced for a dynamic that makes virtue of the constant need for change. Whatever that ambience is, it must influence the meanings we attribute to ambient intelligence, and it must have a crucial effect on how societies are managed and controlled by artificial intelligence.
