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

by dhw, Wednesday, August 18, 2010, 15:15 (5012 days ago) @ romansh

BBella defined intelligence as "goal oriented problem solving energy", while George preferred "problem solving ability". Romansh suggests "the ability of an entity to synthesize at least one response that is correlated with at least one stimulus."-It was Matt who opened this thread, with reference to a Universal Intelligence which might be "wholly different" from ours, whereas in my post of 15 May at 09.29 I argued that I would imagine such an intelligence to be much the same as ours, only immeasurably more advanced.-Romansh has already debated this topic on another forum, so first of all thank you for reviving it on ours, as I don't think we really delved very deep. You gave me a good laugh with your response to your own definition: "We end up asking how intelligent is a brick ... not whether it is". I could just imagine the intelligent brick synthesizing its disintegration under the sledgehammer. The problem-solving definition ignores the fact that you need to be intelligent even to realize that there IS a problem. (I shan't go into the implications of my own inability to solve most of the problems I'm confronted with.)-You have come to the conclusion that "intelligence is deeply entwined with the concepts of consciousness, life, free will" etc., and I find that more helpful than the definitions offered so far. How about "a conscious ability to perceive, learn, understand and think about things, and to apply the knowledge thereby acquired"? -This brings me neatly to the second question you have raised under Sort of an Introduction: "Knowledge is one of those strange words for me ... I think I know what it means but I'm not so sure any more. The spectrum of to know, to think, to believe, to have faith. Is there a scale of grey here?" Exactly my own feelings, but in the light of Matt's response, I think we need to differentiate. Matt recognizes that "the only methods we have to VERIFY claims are necessarily materialistic." (Perhaps we should say verify "objectively" or at least "intersubjectively", since lots of people consider their own experience/opinion/instinct to be sufficient verification.) I agree ... but have never thought of it as "weak" agnosticism, Matt! ... and would say that for instance technology allows us a black and white on our spectrum. If it works, we can say we have knowledge. But the tones get greyer and greyer when we don't have such material tests. The constant flow of new discoveries that make us adjust our vision of the universe, or of the history of life and the evolution of man, blurs the borders even between scientific knowledge and belief, and many of today's "facts" are likely to become tomorrow's fiction. I suspect that in certain contexts, Darrow was right and we'll never touch the coat tails of truth, or to take Matt's analogy, we'll never truly know the dance. In this great scheme of things, I'd be inclined to say, with sceptical tongue in cheek, that knowledge is the belief that something is certain. One of my own favourite quotes is Karl Popper's "Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite."