People often talk about intelligence, but it is hard to say what it is. We measure IQ (Intelligence Quotient), but it isn’t entirely clear what that is measuring. This is illustrated by the Flynn Effect, which shows that IQ seems to be increasing over time. Some people have suggested that IQ is sensitive to culture, and I’m inclined to agree with that.
So what is intelligence? In this post, I shall give some of my own opinions. I don’t think there is a consensus answer to the question.
Biology and intelligence
I am inclined to think of intelligence as biological.
Take a pot plant on your window sill, and rotate it around. The plant will begin to change its growth patterns toward the new direction of light. The pot plant appears to have the ability to change its behavior so as to adapt to changes in the environment. Mechanical objects don’t do this.
Yes, AI systems can respond to some changes in the environment. But they only respond in ways that are part of their programming. Biological organisms, even lowly plants, seem better able to adapt to such changes.
From my point of view, an ability to adapt is intelligence.
A recent post in the online Nautilus magazine looks at the intelligence of the octopus.
The octopus does not have a brain like ours. Its neural system is distributed throughout the body, including its arms, rather than being mainly concentrated in the head. The way that intelligence evolved in the octopus seems to be pretty much independent of the way that it evolved in humans. Yet they appear to be very intelligent creatures.
The tree of evolution bears many fruits and many flowers, and intelligence, rather than being found only in the highest branches, has in fact flowered everywhere.
Intelligence and logic
There has been a strong tendency to connect intelligence with logic. I am inclined to believe that this has been a mistake. Logic itself is mechanistic; it is the following of rules. But an intelligent person knows when it makes more sense to break the rules. I have never been convinced that logic in itself is intelligent.
Logic is a useful tool for systematically studying a problem. We can think of logic as a way of systematizing. We can use logic to systematize how we apply our intelligence. And that can be a useful way of amplifying our intelligence. That’s probably why people think of logic as being part of intelligence. But, as best I can tell, we only use it to systematize human intelligence. There does not appear to be any intelligence coming from the logic itself.
The field of artificial intelligence is based on the idea of using logic to produce intelligence. I remember when a speaker gave a talk on AI at our campus. He introduced his topic by saying that we had already automated clerical tasks. And now we were automating intellectual tasks. But it seemed to me that the AI systems were mainly automating the clerical aspects of intellectual tasks.
Yes, AI can do some rather impressive things. And machine learning can also be impressive. But machine learning seems to be very different from human learning. When I am at the checkout counter of the grocery store, I still notice that the computer systems can only recognize the items by means of the UPC codes on them and by looking up those codes in a database.
Trial and error
If often seems to me that a lot of human learning depends on trial and error. We test out our ideas to see what works. In a way, logic is mostly a method of systematically using trial and error for certain kinds of problems.
Trial and error is really an example of pragmatism, or doing what works. And it often seems to me that pragmatism is practical intelligence. Evolution itself is pragmatic, in the sense that natural selection goes with what turns out to work.
In order to use pragmatism, you do need a measure of whether what you are trying to do is actually working. And it seems to me that our emotions often provide that measure. Fear, anger and depression are indications that something is not working. Happiness and satisfaction are indications that things are working. So perhaps our emotions are more important than we have realized. Perhaps they are the way that our biology helps us evaluate what we are doing.
The Heretical Philosopher 