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What is intelligence?

Sentience

Sentience

Bluelighter
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Oct 15, 2009
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To be clear, I dont want a dictionary definition or any currently official definition. I want you to think about this and put it into your own words using your own terminology and expressing your own theories.
 
Intelligence is not waddling around with your head in your ass.

Each person has their own form of intellect, there is no one system for testing this truly. A person will be smarter than another in their own area, that which their mind is electro-chemically hardwired for. Some people are naturally gifted in economics, so they become stockbrokers, while others become musicians. Either person can't do the others job, unless you're talking about Dave Mustaine. To me, intelligence is being proficient at doing many things, not just one, being a sort of Renaissance man.

It also has to do with how much your mind uses in capacity in any given frequency range.
 
I find intelligence not to be stored data (though it helps) I find intelligence to be the ability to conceptualize. Without the ability to do that, information is just utterly useless.
 
I think intelligence is largely domain-specific, falling into differentiated lines of development that interact to produce the gestalt we call "intelligence".

Or perhaps the lowest common denominator shared across all these developmental lines is what we should call intelligence.
 
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I think that intelligence is the mental aspect of the ability to problem solve and obtain the results you want.....Wisdom is a combination of willpower, morality, ability predict long term outcomes, the ability to understand nature and oneself, and while it incorporates intelligence it goes way behind it.

I think there are different aptitudes that make up the 'tools of intelligence'....a good long or short term memory. Good at mathematical intelligence. Good at linear thinking. Being good at non-linear thinking. Language skills. The ability to pick up on clues and put the information together. Right-brain skills are less objective for tests, but include the ability to recognize faces and detect emotion or read people using subtle gestures.....the right brain probably has more calculation power than the left brain, despite being less objective. The sheer volume of subconscious calculations makes the right brain essential for our daily lives.
 
I would say that is an aspect of intelligence, but I think that is more of a passive intelligence. What about active intelligence? By active I mean creativity, or deciding what you want to do in the first place, or inventing a new invention that didnt used to exist, or writing a novel or making music.

Passive intelligence, like filling in the right bubble on a multiple choice test, is certainly 1 aspect of intelligence but I believe that higher intelligence is more active and creative and perhaps harder to measure.
 
^ Yeah, basically.


The word "intelligence" is used in many ways.

Sometimes it is used to describe the retention of knowledge, in the form of facts, memories of experiences, etc. (crystalline intelligence).

Sometimes it describes the ability to make observations and apply those newfound concepts in solving a problem (fluid intelligence).

You can tease apart that second definition into two subcategories of quantitative measure of fluid intelligence, as far as I can tell. You can measure intelligence as the efficiency, or speed, by which someone solves a certain class of problem. Or, you could measure the point at which the complexity of a problem renders them incapable of finding a solution.

I know next to nothing of modern intelligence tests, though, so those are just my own observations.
 
I think that to judge intelligence, you have to take into consideration the fact that a person might be extremely lazy or have different goals in their life, yet be extremely intelligent.

I think that someone who is able to think in advance in complex situations and also come up with good ideas/things to try, is intelligent. I think those 2 things come hand in hand, and could be even considered the same things? In my eyes, it's mainly inventors of new things, and great philosophers, that are good examples of people that are surely intelligent.

Ability to solve a problem requires will. Ability to be rich requires you to want to be rich and have the will. Being successful does not mean you are surely intelligent, but it will be that way very often.
 
intelligence is the ability to process any given amount of data.
How effectively against how quickly the data is processed into a conclusion gives a measure of the degree of intelligence.
the ability to see, for example, is intelligence.
The ability to articulate in detail and accuracy. that which you percieve is an example of higher intelligence.
 
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well, not necessarily.
There's a well-known website i use sometimes where you type in the ingredients you have in your cupboard and it tells you what you can make with them.
Of course the Artificial Intelligence event-horizon is when the machine has a sense of self, an awareness of its state of being. but A.I on a basic scale is a computers ability to make conclusions, when given any amount of data, in which it takes its environmental parameters into account and adjusts its decisions accordingly, therefore attaining a successful outcome.

I guess therefore you could say, intelligence is the brain's ability to make conclusions, when given any amount of data, in which it takes its environmental parameters into account and adjusts its decisions accordingly, therefore attaining a successful outcome.
 
To me intelligence is precisely the ability to process, analyze, and draw conclusions from abstract information. In my mind there is no difference between intelligence and mathematical reasoning - not precisely mathematics itself, but the relationships between mathematical objects. This is not to say at all an individual needs to know the subject to be intelligent - it is my belief that intelligent people in all other areas of study/inquiry use this type of thinking in their fields/focuses frequently without knowing it.
 
but surely intelligence exists beyond the human mind?
a cockroache's ability to navigate your kitchen floor is done with intelligence of sorts.
 
I did my final exams on this EXACT question. I was studying philosophy at the time.

Didn't Socrates attribute intelligence to being a virtue? I'm high as fuck at the moment, so I can't remember.

I'm feeling productive, I might get my old study guides out! Thanks for the motivation! :D
 
I think intelligence is a measure of a systems ability to perform a given task wrt time and resource utilization. The difficulty of the task is defined by the size of the search space.
For humans/animals/robots we could say that the task is to stay alive, reproduce, etc. and the search space is the input from sensory information and the space of all possible outputs (change in memory and motor control outputs). As none of these systems are general purpose computional systems, their ability to solve some computationally difficult tasks (vision, motor control) may be much better than their ability to perform much simpler tasks (basic math).
 
Most peoples definitions here dont include creativity.

Is creativity not an aspect of intelligence? Imagination?

Creativity and imagination goes beyond problem solving....you could have no imagination at all and be a math wizz.....however, true brilliance requires more than the ability to calculate and problem solve within predictable and well defined circumstances......the ability to brainstorm and create from the infinite clever ways to accomplish your goals, or perhaps inner reflexion and trying to decide what is it you want in the first place.....does this go beyond simple intelligence then?
 
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