What Exactly IS Intelligence? (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Saturday, May 15, 2010, 09:29 (5305 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: In the spirit of BBella's "Ultimate Truth" thread: I've heard a few other people such as dhw explain something about an intelligence "wholly different" than ours. [...] What could it be like?-A mischievously ambiguous question! Does it refer to the way of thinking, or to the immaterial form? I must say, I don't recall ever using such a term (let alone explaining it), but we've had thought-provoking answers already from BBella and George, and it's a useful way of confronting one's own concepts.-As far as I'm concerned, the way of thinking goes back to design. If there is no designer, and life is the result of an accident, our intelligence may well be out on its own. Perhaps there have been other accidents, and other intelligent beings are out there, but I don't think that's what Matt is aiming at. The object of this game, as I interpret it, is to determine the nature of God's intelligence, if he exists. And the reason why I'm surprised at being drawn into the "wholly different" terminology is that this is not what I think at all. The only clue we have as to the nature of God's intelligence lies in what he has created, and the only form of intelligence we actually know is ours. The starting point then has to be the creation, not the creator, and I simply cannot see how he would have produced a form of intelligence "wholly different" from his own. Just as our descent from other animals suggests to me that they must have similar feelings to ours, our "descent" from a hypothetical God suggests that he too must be similar. And so I would argue that we are not anthropomorphizing animals or God when we maintain that there is a direct link. If God created us with our consciousness, emotion, artistic flair, reason, then I take it as a sign that he himself has these same attributes.-That is not to say that our intelligence is on anything like a par with God's, since a being that can design and build a universe and a mechanism giving rise to life and evolution makes us puny in the extreme. -What about form? George believes that intelligence "requires a complexly structured brain", which of course is the materialistic interpretation, and he objects to BBella's use of the word "energy" (which again he sees solely as a "physical quantity"). Perhaps he's right. But David's personal and moving post under "An ideal ultimate truth?" (thank you for that) also refers to "energy" in the context of an afterlife. The problem is that a non-materialistic intelligence is so far beyond our range of knowledge and imagination that language can't really cope. George also objects to BBella's "mystical poetry", but maybe that is the only way to gain verbal access. God, energy, spirit, soul ... it makes no difference. This is the immaterial equivalent of dark matter and dark energy, with the words simply indicating something we don't know.