What is Intelligence?

"SE-I" Definition of Intelligence: 

 Intelligence, to our mind, is the art of rapid and reliable gist-finding, crux-spotting, bull’s-eye-hitting, nub-striking, essence-pinpointing. It is the art of, when one is facing a new situation, swiftly and surely homing in on an insightful precedent (or family of precedents) stored in the recesses of one’s memory. That, no more and no less, is what it means to isolate the crux of a new situation. And this is nothing but the ability to find close analogues, which is to say, the ability to come up with strong and useful analogies. 

 - "Surfaces and Essences" 

This is a working definition of intelligence provided by the two authors, who are (not surprisingly) stunningly intelligent by their own definition. The book is itself a massive collection of strong and useful analogies.

IQ

The "man on the street" more or less equates "intelligence" with IQ. It's something people "have", like their height. And, like height, it can be "measured" by a test. There are problems with this idea.

As a reminder, let's take a glance at typical questions on an IQ test:

Some tests consist entirely of questions like the first two examples. These tests are timed. Anyone seeing such questions for the first time may be excused for taking the whole time to figure out the format. The second question assumes numerical literacy beyond that available to 20% to 30% of the American population - mainly because of the American educational system. I have asked a few of my friends for the answer to the last question. I got it wrong twice and nobody I know got it right the first time. What I'd say in general, is that such questions "test" our ability to answer such questions. They "test" our ability to spot surface analogies. Computers are great at that. Check out typical "analogy" questions from a real IQ test to see this. For those who live with Google at our elbow, it is easy to imagine a computer program blowing this test away; this is what happens. Try it yourself. Ask Google "left is to right as vertical is ". Google will autocomplete "vertical". You might be less impressed if you ask Google why that's the right answer.

Even for its advocates, IQ is supposed to be correlated with "G-General Intelligence" - a slippery aspect of mental capacity that is assumed to be real but cannot be tested directly. The existence of "G" is taken for granted. As we will see, SE challenges this assumption subtly. We expect SE to correlate with IQ in some ways (such as in "verbal reasoning" tests), but it is difficult to come up with a test for SE-I (not impossible). But SE-I is unlike "G" (and therefore IQ) in several ways:

• Nothing is preventing an individual from increasing SE-I over a lifetime. In fact, it is a rare individual who does not increase his/her SE-I over a lifetime or even a week. IQ (and G) are supposed to be stable of a lifetime - imagined to be a property of the individual brain.
• IQ (and G) are supposed to be independent of culture. Great efforts are made to remove cultural "bias" from IQ tests (one reason why "verbal reasoning" is often omitted entirely from IQ tests). SE-I, on the other hand, strongly depends on culture. In fact, SE will increase as the culture itself becomes "smarter". This agrees with the Flynn Effect, which documents that IQ is a moving target - people are doing better on IQ tests as time goes on (5 points every 20 years). This fact alone shows that there is something seriously wrong with IQ and the assumptions behind it - namely that "G" is a stable measure of individual intelligence. 
• SE-I gives hints about how to "test" for intelligence, and, in fact, IQ tests are all about the ability of the individual to detect analogies. However, these analogies are what SE-I would call "superficial". IQ tests do not test The ability to develop "strong and useful" analogies. For example, knowing that "vertical is to horizontal as left is to right" is true but not particularly useful or powerful.
• In fact, IQ scores can vary wildly for individuals (my own varies by 35 points depending on the type of test and my mood). Most people will remember their highest score (or imagine they would get), resulting in the phenomenon that most people think of themselves as "above average" IQ-wise. This is statistically impossible of course, since, by definition, 50% of the population is below average.

As we will see, SE-I has a few powerful implications that leave the IQ concept on the scrap heap. More than that, we will see that SE explains why IQ has so many problems. It turns out that the assumption that G is an individual, measurable property is wrong too.

To see why our ideas of intelligence are circling the drain, ask Google "Is Donald Trump Intelligent"? SE-I provides an immediate and obvious answer. Does IQ help at all?  Many commentators, including Trump, assume IQ "is" intelligence. Conceding that point to Trump, the discussion becomes a food fight about the failure of IQ to "define" what people mean by intelligence. SE-I can step into the gap and helpfully point out what we all understand about the intelligence of the President.

The SE-I approach can usefully "put the finger" on the "nub of the matter" - Trump's inability to productively and usefully employ a rich set of analogies in his decision-making. The fact that he makes no use of the massive resources of the Central Intelligence Agency is also relevant. This is frequently because he uses the wrong "frame" for the issue. As we will see, SE-I intelligence is not an attribute of one person or, if it is, a person who isolates himself from others is the SE-I equivalent of a moron, not the least because he doesn't understand what intelligence is.

WHAT KINDS OF ENTITIES CAN BE INTELLIGENT?

IQ was invented to sort out recruits for the military. Who is smart enough to pull the trigger. Who is smart enough to fly an aircraft? The project was all about individual selection. Subsequent attempts to rescue the concept from blatant cultural bias have, as we will see, stripped IQ of any claim to legitimacy - in fact, bringing IQ farther and farther from SE and the sister concept of "G".

INDIVIDUAL "IQ"

Attempts to strip "culture" from IQ have forced IQ test to blatantly "measure" ability to do well on IQ tests. Tests focus on the interpretation of abstract figures and numbers - something that is assumed to correlate with"G" - an assumption that depends on the existence of G in the first place. A useful analogy may help. Suppose we have a measure called IH - general health quotient. We mark it on the curve, like IQ and "measure" it by getting the individual to run a 100-yard dash. That will correlate well with the vague concept of "health" but obviously leaves out a lot of factors that anyone would recognize as health-related. More to the point, anyone would recognize that a single number, marked on the curve, is a silly way to measure "health". But that is exactly how IQ "measures" intelligence - a concept that we all know in our hearts to be vastly complex. In fact, we all assume that complexity when we claim to be intelligent despite unremarkable IQ.

GROUP IQ

It is a common experience - in fact, built into the way society actually functions - that "two heads are better than one". Mathematically, it is obvious that an IQ test performed by two people will result in a higher score than either individual could achieve. This is easy and fun to test. For an IQ test, this is "cheating". But nothing is preventing SE-I from describing the ability of a group to "come up with strong and useful analogies". More precisely, the SE-I concept can be used to observe the effect of adding expertise to a group (Surfaces and Essences has a powerful definition of "expertise" that I will discuss later). My experience working with many smart people is that coming up with strong and useful analogies has always involved other people.

CULTURAL AND LANGUAGE IQ

Obviously, the ability to "come up with strong and useful analogies" depends on what sorts of situations a person (or group) knows about that are "like" a new situation. To cite an obvious example, if the group is fully comfortable with mathematical concepts, it can come up with analogies involving space and time. Knowing 30,000 words of a 700,000-word language (along with the multiple meanings of many words) is an advantage - a vast collection of analogies "built-in" to the language. Don't we assume that a University education will make us "smarter"? And how, exactly, does that work? Is it not by broadening our resources of useful analogies? That means that culture and language not only contribute to "group SE" but that we may speak of the culture and language itself as having a "high SE-I"

If there is a single theme in "Surfaces and Essences", it is the richness of language itself - we are "swimming in a sea of analogies". And the sea grows wider and deeper by the minute.

COMPUTERS

"Artificial Intelligence" is all the rage these days. But what does "intelligence" mean. My experience as a programmer, including in the field of Artificial Intelligence, tells me that it would be easy to write a program that aces every IQ test thrown at it. Many "experts" have claimed that this result has already been achieved. Of course, the problem with this claim is that IQ is not defined for anything but an individual human's performance relative to a large population of humans taking the same or similar test. A computer IQ might hypothetically compare one computer (say an iPhone with a specific set of apps and options) to the performance of a population of other iPhones with the same apps. The results would not be impressive since we would expect all of the iPhones to perform identically.

The SE-I concept escapes the limitations imposed by the statistical definition of IQ. As we have already seen, it makes sense to talk about the SE-I "intelligence" of a language or culture. Computer applications like Google Search provide access to a large subset of human knowledge. Someone with access to Google Search will do better than someone without such access on an essay question involving what we would call "creativity".

To illustrate this point, imagine Joe is a student in High School. He has been assigned to write an essay on the topic "Why is love like a rose?". He pulls out his iPhone and asks Google:  "Why is love like a rose?" On the first page of results, we find this poem by Phil Panebianco:

Love is like a rose, when it blossoms it's so new and fresh.Each petal is so beautiful and soft.Each petal holds something special, the good times, the bad times, the times we wished never happened and the time that have yet to be written.But like a roses thorns, love can hurt too.In time we manage to ease the pain, but never forget how good the rose felt to have. We always want more.A rose is a sign of love, a sign of caring.It's lets us know someone is thinking about us.A rose last a long time, but true love never dies.You hold it in your heart forever.You cherish it with all your heart and soul.Roses can come and go, but you only get one true love of your life and that true love is you.Always has been, always will be.

That's a pretty good answer. Of course, our student cannot directly use it (that would be "plagiarism"), but the poem delves deeply into the analogy in question. In Joe's mind, the analogy makes more sense. Perhaps at that point, he will delve into his own experience to find something "like" what is described in the poem. Maybe all he can come up with is his love of his dog. Maybe not. In both cases, Joe is 

 facing a new situation, swiftly and surely homing in on an insightful precedent (or family of precedents) stored in the recesses of one’s memory. That, no more and no less, is what it means to isolate the crux of a new situation. And this is nothing but the ability to find close analogues, which is to say, the ability to come up with strong and useful analogies

Something is going on here that seems a lot like SE-I intelligence. But who or what is "intelligent"? SE-I does not constrain us to answer (a) the student, (b) Phil Panebianco (c) Google (d) the student's iPhone. The answer is "all of the above". SE-I even gives us a clue about how to parse the contributions of each choice. It should be pointed out that Joe has dozens of other suggestions from Google, allowing him to dig around until he finds something that "clicks". In any case, he should come out with a better understanding of the idea and a better ability to communicate the idea. It's also true that our list (a) ... (d) does not exhaust the possibilities. Some credit must be given to the teacher, the school and the English Language. Sometimes "intelligence" consists of asking an intelligent question.

We can draw a "strong and useful analogy" by looking more closely at option (a) above. Would that answer be correct about the student or a combination of systems in the student's brain? If it's a combination of systems, why exclude Joe's iPhone?

BRAIN SYSTEMS

SE-I can "drill down" on individual brains and assess "intelligence" of brain systems. Consider the visual system. Without going into excessive detail, the function of this system is to extract "meaningful" information from a stream of input from the eyes. The "hardware" of this system manages to extract a stunning array of "strong and useful analogies" - a fact that becomes more and more obvious as we try to duplicate this system to create self-driving cars:

• We "see" 3 dimensions when we are actually looking at a pair of 2-dimensional arrays
• We "see" a thousand colours when we actually see 3 analog measures of the intensity of 3 colours.
• We "see" the world as filled with objects: desks, doors, floors, trees, dogs ...

And so forth ...

In Joe's case, we can include the stunning capability of his visual system, plus his hard-won ability to read, plus his ability to understand language, plus the language itself.

DOGS

"Surfaces and Essences" provides us with a long list of categories and analogies recognized by a dog owned by one of the authors. The list is impressively long (something that irritates some readers of the book), but conclusively demonstrates the usefulness of the SE-I concept. Dogs have an SE-I that is well into the "plus" range and comparable to human SE-I. Using SE-I, it makes sense to ask if dogs are "as smart" as humans. IQ is no help here since, by definition, IQ applies only to humans.

CONCLUSION

Visitors to this blog will spot my prejudice for regarding "mind" as a "distributed" phenomenon. The idea of intelligence, like the idea of  "mind", makes sense when applied at many scales from the cell to human society. The boundaries of mind extend deeply into the "real world" of our creations, environment and our socially-determined interpretation of that environment. Our habit of regarding mind as something going on in the brain of one person is preventing us from seeing the "big picture": the essence of mind.

SE-I is itself a concept, an idea based on analogy. "Surfaces and Essences" claims that all ideas are based on analogy. I have provided a few examples of the category (hundreds more could be provided). The aim is to define SE-I as a category - what a friend calls something you "know it when you see it". We really need to let go of our idea that intelligence as what an intelligence tests measures or "correlates" with G. SE-I is a definition, not a statistical construct. "Surfaces and Essences" educates us to expect something a bit different in the way of a "definition". Instead of what we'd find in a dictionary or a geometry textbook, we are being shown the situations where the idea of SE-I applies. We are being educated to use the word "intelligence" in a way that turns out to be much closer to how we usually use it - not as a synonym for "IQ".

SE-I allows us to think productively about intelligence. It provides us with "strong and useful analogies". In fact, understanding SE-I itself makes us smarter! We could expect no more from the authors of SE-I.

= PS. In 2023, AI became available to the average person in many forms, most notably CHAT-GPT, which is available as an iPhone app at the time of writing. This is how CHAT-GPT answers the question, Why is love like a rose:

Love is often compared to a rose because both can be beautiful, delicate, and yet capable of causing pain. Just as a rose's thorns can prick you, love can bring both joy and heartache. Love, like a rose, can be enchanting and captivating, but it also requires care and attention to flourish. Just as a rose needs nurturing to bloom, love requires effort, understanding, and compromise to thrive.

Stephen Hawking, Mensa and Intelligent Answers to Good Questions

Last night I attempted to introduce the idea of "Spinosa's God" to a MENSA group. I got my head torn off. Although these people are in the top 3% on the IQ scale, they are all over the map on the "emotional intelligence" scale, nor can one assume that they are widely informed outside of their various specialties, even though they tend to assume that. It is famously difficult to know what you don't know, but especially difficult for smart people. I call this the Donal Rumsfeld syndrome. But don't get me started ...

"Spinosa's God", defended by Einstein and the coincidentally recently deceased Stephen Hawking refers to the unexpected deep order in the Universe. This "God" is not a person behind the scenes, pulling the strings to punish the bad guys and reward the good guys. "He" is totally impersonal - another name for physical law, which turns out to be comprehensible by the human mind - mostly in terms of mathematics. It is important to understand that those who speak of this kind of "God" are speaking of their personal feeling of awe, not a fact "out there" in the world.

In our "conversation" (food fight) at MENSA, I reminded my friends of my time 40 years ago as a junior Minister and theological student. For them, this tarred me as a Scientologists or ISIS terrorists. It seemed to be impossible to get anyone to talk about what they believed or I believed to take a break from filling the room with "straw men". They competed with each other to rant about the stupidity of un-named individuals who were not there to defend themselves. Logically speaking, blaming all the evils of the world on people who believe in God is equivalent to blaming the same problems on people who are over 2 feet tall. For most of history, everyone believed in God.

So here, in a "note to myself" let me say a few things I would have loved to have on the table with the "top 3%".

For one thing, even in my most "religious" years (age 27 or so), I leaned toward the "Theology of Wonder", specifically that of G. K. Chesterton. That is about the experience of awe and humility inspired by the Universe - growing more compelling the more you learn about the Universe. As the Island of Knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of the unknown. At the time, I felt this compatible with a career in the professional clergy. I was also taken up with the language and mythology of the evangelicals, who stressed a "personal relationship with Jesus". To me, at the time, this meant bringing my personal affairs into line with what we imagined to be a personal, daily relationship with Jesus. My MENSA friends were not at all interested in the fact that education of the professional clergy is mainly about understanding the myth as myth. They imagined themselves as uniquely able to spot the logical inconsistencies in the "faith", which is an achievement akin to proving that Superman is not a real person and being proud of the insight.

In the long run (by my 30th birthday) I saw all this as a language -  a way of talking about life in a way that admitted you to a certain social circle. It was a point along a very long journey from the time someone told me about God (age 5) to the present day (age 71). I can still speak the language and appreciate the worldview, but it's all very much in the rearview mirror. My MENSA friends showed no interest in what I believed now or how I viewed my old ideas: only in competing with each other to attack what they imagined other idiots (not named or present) must believe. It was MENSA at its worst.

As it happens, my journey has taken me back to the old neighborhood in the last year. I wrote about the dismaying hollowness of a modern Christian Service here. This was made all the more unsettling because the young Minister was exactly at the point that I would have been at her age (early 30's), attempting to force what she really meant into the procrustean bed of "Christian" language.

I was also reminded of Spinosa's God through my project to read everything Damasio has written, including "Looking for Spinosa".

The fact is that none of this interested my MENSA chums, who don't seem to read or think very much. The previous hour of discussion had been devoted to Game of Thrones and Zombie movies.

What was it that had dragged me back to reconsider issues that had been buried for 40 years? Looking closely, I think it was an emotional shock - a sudden realization that there is something absolutely real and important but previously caught only out of the corner of my eye. The "Theology of Wonder" came roaring back.

I tripped over it quite accidentally when I considered the "proto-life" era. I quite vividly imagined the impressive complexity of the first known life form and the yawning gap - perhaps permanently mysterious - between physics and the simplest form of life. Not really an original insight, right? But it bothered me. It kept me awake for hours. It stayed with me as a new, important feature of reality. It's a bit like the Big Bang. I have no direct knowledge of the Big Bang, nor does it have the slightest impact on my life. Yet it is profoundly important to my worldview - always in the background. This is something the hardened skeptic has problems grasping: that "spiritual" insight can come as much from the shocking realization of what you don't know as from what you suddenly do know.

This is not entirely unrelated to the long series of shocks that came in the last few years from my study of Zen. For example, I found that I had no idea what I meant by the word "self" or even the word "I". For me, at least, the "spiritual" attitude comes from "knowing" less and less about more an more - a fundamentally Zen concept. But I digress ...

Is it unreasonable for other, intelligent human beings to grasp these awesome mysteries and wrap them up into a feeling of humility and awe that is religious? Is it crazy to seek out a community that shares these feelings? Is it not the height of arrogance to assume that such people are reacting foolishly to not knowing answers to the ultimate questions? It is the conceit of the world-weary cynic to imagine that "religious" people think they have all the answers. It is not a fundamental error of logic to assume that although some religious proponents talk as if they have all the answers, that this is typical or even universal of the "type". These are errors that are shocking to find in a group that prides itself in exceptional intelligence. To many in that room investigate the wonders of the Universe by devouring and endlessly discussing Game of Thrones: leave the crazy speculation to the fools.

One particularly high-decibel genius defended the theory that the Universe is a simulation (the Matrix idea). He failed to see that this is logically equivalent to belief in God behind the scenes. The only difference is a modern "science fiction" gloss - something that a Scientologist would appreciate. "Believers" in the Matrix theory show exactly the unwillingness to discuss things like "proof" that we see in hardcore theists. The only difference is that the theists are also tarred with all the evils committed for thousands of years by people who believe in God. In my narrow experience, the Matrix idea is uniquely popular among people who are smart enough to be fooled by it. And people who watch too much TV.

These ultimate mysteries form a common ground for respectful dialogue between "religious" folks and the rest of us. There I also a broad common ground in our common acceptance of social justice - although the modern skeptic will loudly deny this has anything to do with our Christian traditions.

One "bumper sticker" sums up my personal "religion":

"Whatever this is, we're all in it together". 

When it comes to profound ignorance on deeply important matters, there is no "us and them".

The Flynn Effect

It's called the "Flynn effect" — the fact that each generation scores higher on an IQ test than the generation before it. Are we actually getting smarter, or just thinking differently? In this fast-paced spin through the cognitive history of the 20th century, moral philosopher James Flynn suggests that changes in the way we think have had surprising (and not always positive) consequences.

                   - Ted Talk by James Flynn

James Flynn

It is well established that we are, as a culture, getting better at IQ tests. There is a lot of debate over this effect, but I like the explanation offered by Flynn himself.  He takes the bold position that we are, in fact, getting smarter - not just better at taking IQ tests.

In a nutshell, he claims that we have more powerful intellectual tools. Every member of this culture is trained in these tools from birth. The tools are shared.

This has profound implications for one of he central ideas of this blog: that consciousness itself is shared.

Specifically, we are demonstrably getting better at classification and abstract reasoning. Flynn helps us imagine how that could be by providing some insight into how typical well-educated people reasoned not so long ago.

I would say that the ability to make useful classifications and perform abstract reasoning are both key aspects of the way we experience the world - consciousness itself.

It is the culture, most notably the language, that is getting "smarter".

This is perhaps the strongest proof that we are programmed by language and culture.

The Flynn Effect

If IQ is a measure of intelligence, we are much smarter than previous generations. This is a verified fact. In this presentation, Flynn himself analyses the effect. At the core of his argument is the idea that we are getting better and better at considering the "hypothetical". This can also be seen as an enhanced capability to use analogy and find abstract categories: an ability that increases with successive generations.

Taking it all together, we see the power of analogy growing through time. In other words, it's culture as a whole that's getting "smarter".