Idea: Intelligence is the simple biological process that makes us human. We need to use our intuitive understanding of this word to discuss our behaviour productively.
I’m writing this out of frustration. I’m finding it impossible to write other posts because I’m using the word intelligence and its synonyms in a way I know people will object to. I’ll just bullet point some thoughts about this word and its use.
I’ll start with some questions to appeal to your intuition:
-Do you think only people with academic ability are intelligent?
-Think of all the behaviour you might feel comfortable describing as smart (eg, social behaviour, compelling art, starting a successful business). Do you feel you should stop doing this? Maybe you should only use that word for performance on IQ tests?
-Does someone always exhibit the same level of intelligence in every situation?
-If someone is told an undeniable fact they’d rather not hear, is a refusal to accept it a reflection of their intelligence?
-What’s more likely to be productive: people with common social goals but different opinions debating in good faith about their knowledge and understanding, or demands by each side that the other accept they’re immoral and their ideas are driven by harmful emotions? If someone by default insists on choosing the latter, are they being smart or stupid?
-Imagine you have two equally selfish people. One understands they need to display pro-social behaviour to be successful and the other doesn’t. What’s determining the difference between them?
-Intuitively, are the words intelligent, reasonable, stupid, smart, rational, wise, describing different versions of a similar process or are they fundamentally different things, like the words river and chair, for example?
The questions above appeal to our intuition that intelligence and its synonyms is at the heart of everything we do. We are after all homo sapiens, wise apes. I think we need to rediscover the intuition that led Carl Linnaeus to give us this label over 200 hundred years ago. Discussions about our behaviour have become unproductive and often toxic due to second hand knowledge about academic disciplines that themselves are still young. We spend too much time talking about emotions, motivations, values, and biases when people often have the same underlying humanity but different levels of knowledge and understanding. In other words, they’re being more or less wise, or they’re being more or less intelligent.
Based on my background in molecular and cellular neuroscience, I think:
-In plain English, the points below claim that intelligence refers to the basic biological process that makes us human and our intuitive use of this word is required for us to talk intelligently about our behaviour.
-In less plain English... most complex behaviour isn’t directly generated by brain-specific genes; they’re too few in number to generate this complexity directly.
-To allow complex behaviour to emerge, brain-specific genes organise information derived from the senses so that it can be processed by the same basic mechanism (or maybe a few mechanisms). In other words, these basic processes are repeated across discrete anatomical regions of the brain that are organised based on the type of information they process.
-The purpose of the brain is to mirror the casual structure of the external world so that basic motives can be satisfied.
-The end result or the process of mirroring the structure of the external world is what we refer to as ‘intelligence’ and its synonyms. It is the basic process that makes us human.
-The word intelligence and its synonyms should be set aside for use in natural, intuitive language to discuss human behaviour. Academic disciplines, for example, should generate their own labels for intelligence, or at the very least their definitions of intelligence should be understood as only applicable within the confines of their academic activity.
To reinforce the last point above, I’m suggesting common usage of words related to intelligence has split, in a contradictory and unproductive way, between our intuitive understanding and a perception of what science claims. For example, we naturally describe all kinds of behaviour as smart or stupid, but it’s not uncommon to see people claim that you need to be good academically to be intelligent.
Concepts such as IQ have led to the belief that people have a fixed amount of intelligence they apply constantly, whereas I think we naturally view intelligence as something that ebbs and flows and should be judged on a case-by-case basis.
As I’ll suggest in other posts, intelligence creates the diversity of emotions, motivation, and biases etc that we’re familiar with from a common set of basic needs (e.g. sex, food, community, etc). Therefore, it’s intelligence that creates our emotions, not our emotions that influence our intelligence.
We need to have more intellectual humility! We should normalise the questioning of each other’s intelligence because intelligence determines everything we do and people can be more or less intelligent in any given situation.
I think I’ll leave this post here despite having much more to say! In summary, intelligence is the basic biological process that makes us human. Our intuitive understanding of it, as expressed in natural language, is currently closer to the truth than half-understood ideas from relatively young academic disciplines. Intelligence ebbs and flows and we should accept we can’t discuss our behaviour without referring to it, and while accepting our own limitations.