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What is intelligence?

Sentience said:
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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I see creativity as part of intelligence; it fits into the synthesis of new information I referred to in my definition. Imagination on the other hand I see as something completely distinct.
 
Imagination is a tool your intelligence can use then....like a good memory may or may not go hand in hand with good math or vocabulary skills, any of those skills may or may not come with a vivid imagination.

Having a vivid imagination allows you to test wild possibilities.....being able to manifest those possibilities requires intelligence and worldly knowledge, but without the vision and imagination to create those possibilities in your minds eye first, you wouldnt have anything useful to problem solve for.
 
So to make it easier intelligence is the sum total of cognitive capablilities and how quickly they are executed, judging by what you seem to be getting at
Or is memory something separate from intelligence altogether?
Wisdom is the practical blending of congitive capabilities and experience.
In a sense memory is the use of the mind of the past; wisdom is use of the mind of the present; and intelligence is the use of the mind for the future.
Strange.
 
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Sometimes I link willpower and morality as well as knowledge with wisdom.....Intelligence is knowing how to make a bomb. Wisdom is about whether you SHOULD make a bomb......its a question without an inherently right or wrong answer. Its not something you can figure out with a mathematical formula, and there isnt a right or wrong bubble to fill in on a standardized test.....but there is a lot going on upstairs when people are pondering the meaning of life and their purpose on this earth, and when they are deciding what kind of person they want to be.

I would argue that somebody of moderate intelligence, who is smart enough but not a wizz at math or great at memory games, and could even be young without tons of experience.....maybe this person could still be wise if they are perceptive to social and interpersonal dynamics, and has an emotional tendency towards morality and compassion and a degree of cleverness in intuitively predicting outcomes of approaches.....

In contrast, you could have somebody who is an absolute genius when it comes to high level math and physics, and yet they are a social dunce unable to understand the human condition or relate to others, and lacking interpersonal skills, their life is a wreck and they lack the wisdom to improve their standing since they cannot make the connection between their social approaches and its outcomes.

I think wisdom tends to be a social intelligence, because its dealing with complex situations with infinite variables, where there is no right or wrong answer, no theorem or equation to solve for, no objective proof to support your decision, and yet this ability can determine whether you will be happy or successful in life.
 
intelligence is open-mindedness

intelligence is treating everyone as if they are the enlightened ones and you the ignorant one
 
Sentience said:
Imagination is a tool your intelligence can use then....like a good memory may or may not go hand in hand with good math or vocabulary skills, any of those skills may or may not come with a vivid imagination.

Having a vivid imagination allows you to test wild possibilities.....being able to manifest those possibilities requires intelligence and worldly knowledge, but without the vision and imagination to create those possibilities in your minds eye first, you wouldnt have anything useful to problem solve for.
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Imagination complements intelligence, but in definition I still see them as completely distinct. Based on what you said would I be correct in assuming you agree with that? I also hold the same attitude toward intelligence and the utility of that knowledge.
 
Im still formulating how I define things, but yeah, imagination is more than problem solving for sure.....I guess it depends on how we define intelligence.

Would Mozart have been a math wiz? I bet he would have flunked out, accused of having ADD because he was more interested in his music.
 
If you accept the validity of IQ tests as accurate standards of intelligence (I'm still unsure about this), "experts" project that Mozart would have an IQ of over 150. This doesn't necessarily mean that he would have been talented in math, but it seems to indicate that he would have some formalism in his thought patterns. If he might have failed math, it goes toward motivation more likely than a lack of ability. The patterns and symmetry evident in his symphonies demonstrates some degree of methodical thinking.

There has been fascinating research done on the connections between mathematical ability and musical talent. I'll see if I can find some...
 
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I do not accept the theory of IQ.

If people have scored similarly in different categories of intelligence, its because they didnt divide up the types of cognitive skills correctly, not because variations in distinct cognitive skills dont exist.
 
Sentience said:
Im still formulating how I define things, but yeah, imagination is more than problem solving for sure.....I guess it depends on how we define intelligence.

Would Mozart have been a math wiz? I bet he would have flunked out, accused of having ADD because he was more interested in his music.
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I bet Mozart would have been amazing at math. If he wasn't a famous composer he could have probably been on par with Isaac Newton, talent is a sort of universal attribute that manifests itself in many aspects of the mind and one's pesonality.
Also remember that Mozart wasn't subject to the factory style school system that is so standardized today, he simply displayed unbelievable musical talent, writing full symphonies in his head at age 5, and was given the resources to carry out his talents so he never had time for anything else, nor the desire. I would bet 100% that he would have excelled at math too if he was exposed to that.
 
Sentience said:
I do not accept the theory of IQ.

If people have scored similarly in different categories of intelligence, its because they didnt divide up the types of cognitive skills correctly, not because variations in distinct cognitive skills dont exist.
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I don't think IQ tests were ever intended to measure different types of cognitive skills, but rather a abstract, general form of reasoning we might call intelligence. Although there might be different categories on an IQ test (verbal, analogies, pictoral, mathematical), they all require the same basic rigorous logic reasoning between two or more objects, whether they might be words or numbers. Or perhaps I am misunderstanding your point...
 
^ I wonder why you would use the word rigorous. The tests are similar tasks solved over and over with time considerations as to how many of those tasks get completed in a set time period. The results show a knack for certain sorts of reasoning rather than rigorousness.

Secondly I don't think all those different kinds of IQ tests reveal a single faculty but some combination of faculties and some people are going to excel more or falter more on some than others.
 
Liking this thread, as it's something I was thinking/talking about recently.

hlin818 said:
If you accept the validity of IQ tests as accurate standards of intelligence (I'm still unsure about this), "experts" project that Mozart would have an IQ of over 150. This doesn't necessarily mean that he would have been talented in math, but it seems to indicate that he would have some formalism in his thought patterns. If he might have failed math, it goes toward motivation more likely than a lack of ability. The patterns and symmetry evident in his symphonies demonstrates some degree of methodical thinking.
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I found the bolded interesting. You're suggesting that organised thought patterns are a sign of intelligence?

I think this is just another aspect of intelligence. For instance, while the utility of organised/methodical thought is manifest, I still consider some "scatter-brained" people to be intelligent. As, while they may not be as effective at problem solving or getting some things done, they may be highly insightful or creative.

Also, in response to the talk elswhere in the thread, I'm not sure if I like the separation of intelligene and "imagination". When you call someone "smart" or "intelligent", you're basically saying, "they have good stuff happening in their mind". I don't see either memory or imagination on their own as constituting intelligence. But both are a part of intelligence.
 
^^Enki

I meant rigorous more in terms of the precision application of logic rather than exhaustive thoroughness. Although I can't say the definition of the word itself is very rigorous.

This is most certainly true. However, I believe that IQ tests demonstrate a general form of reasoning, whatever form it might take (I am inclined to think it is mathematical or at least some type of symbolic language), that is the common essence of different cognitive faculties tested in a standard IQ test. When applied to different subjects tested, different people will certainly apply this form of reason (likely subconsciously) more successfully to the relationships between certain objects (such as words, diagrams or numbers) than other objects depending on the level of abstraction of their thinking. It is my thought that an individual that has mastery of this general form of reasoning will be able to apply it to all subjects tested successfully. This general reasoning I might call "intelligence". It is this commonality that I find IQ tests useful rather than the actual result of the test, although I suppose there is some correlation.


^Rated E
I certainly believe so in some sense. Who we might call a "scatter-brained" individual I would argue would still possess great organization of thought in terms of a certain subset of their total thought processes. A scatter-brained individual who is intelligent in say, physics, will still have considerable organization in terms of how he relates physical quantities that are correlated. His aggregate thought process would be scattered, but viewing his thoughts in terms of disjoint subcategories would indicate order.

I don't have much to say about the second point, but I will say that memory or imagination goes more to what I see as ability rather than intelligence. Together I might say that creativity + intelligence + memory+efficiency = ability.
 
hlin818 said:
I certainly believe so in some sense. Who we might call a "scatter-brained" individual I would argue would still possess great organization of thought in terms of a certain subset of their total thought processes. A scatter-brained individual who is intelligent in say, physics, will still have considerable organization in terms of how he relates physical quantities that are correlated. His aggregate thought process would be scattered, but viewing his thoughts in terms of disjoint subcategories would indicate order.
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This sounds good.

hlin said:
I don't have much to say about the second point, but I will say that memory or imagination goes more to what I see as ability rather than intelligence. Together I might say that creativity + intelligence + memory+efficiency = ability.
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So intelligence is not creativity, memory or efficiency? Is it solely organisation of thought, then?
 
IQ tests are designed to measure those aspects of human intelligence that have the greatest variance among the population so that you can get a good spread of values.

When most people think of intelligence they think about language based reasoning skills which are evolutionarily new and vary the most among individuals. This may be the case because people find that they the most mistakes in reasoning based tasks or because they give us the ability to solve the largest set of problems. Because of the newness of this skill it is also the least efficient one that we possess compared to our visual, motor control and generalized memory abilities. No one considers the ability to dance intelligence even though it requires the precise control of several degrees of freedom using memory, pattern matching, visuo-spatial maps and even some high level reasoning. Even something much simpler like picking up a cup of water from the desk also requires significant computational resources. Why do we not consider things like this intelligence? It maybe because people are able to perform these tasks effortlessly and hence consider them easy. It is only when you try and implement human / animal intelligence on general purpose computers do you realize that these evolutionarily old abilities are the hardest to implement even though they solve a fixed subset of problems.

"Most peoples definitions here dont include creativity.
Is creativity not an aspect of intelligence? Imagination?"

Almost every problem can be solved by exhaustive search – testing every possibility. As this search space is too large for most tasks an efficient solution is one that picks regions of the space which are most likely to contain the answer recursively. With respect to problem solving, creativity to me is the ability to focus on multiple interesting portions of this search space where someone who is not creative might only look at the obvious regions. Imagination is a consequence of a feedforward technique executed by the visual system which most likely evolved from motor control where this strategy is extensively used. It definitely helps us solve problems in a fundamental way. Consider the game of chess. The search space is the set of all possible boards resulting from a move. Most computer programs work by representing this set as a tree of a certain depth. You could think of this as the computer "imagining" what the board would look like after a set of moves. Each board has a score that gives you an idea of whether you are ahead or not. Now, the goal is to find the branches in this tree that are most likely to end up in you winning. Computers use deterministic algorithms like alpha-beta pruning for this while inexperienced players only focus on the obvious choices. An experienced player however is able to examine interesting and relavent options - they are looking at the problem more creatively.

Anyway, I think that when we try and define intelligence for human beings we tend to pick tasks that we are comparatively poor at. These happen to be language based logical thinking, certain memory based tasks and task switching. This has nothing to do with a computational definition of the term which is the ability to optimize the search space of a set of problems efficiently or put more simply – the ability to solve a set of problems.
 
I really dont believe there is a single intelligence. Even if there is a trend that says if you score high in one field you tend to score high in the others as well.....first of all, this may be statically common but is not true in all cases. Second, while they divide up different skills, most of these skills using multiple faculties....I am not convinced that we have A). Identified the distinct cognitive faculties yet, or B). come up with a test that tests the specific faculties in isolation.....and we cant until we understand exactly what they are.

Any skill is going to use multiple faculties, not just one. If you have a strong faculty, it should manifest in your ability for multiple skills, not just one....but I dont believe that there is only one universal faculty....and no, we dont know for sure that Mozart would excel in math....for all we know, a learning dissability could prevent him from understanding geometry, and we wouldnt know if that specific faculty was not essential for his music....just as a crude example, as I am guessing some of the faculties used in math are necessary for music as well, but some faculties needed for music are not needed for math, and likely vice versa. They might share SOME common faculties, but not ALL common faculties.

So, while exceptional faculties will be seen in a spectrum of talents, there are still multiple faculties that work in unison, and if they have not seen wide variance cross category, its because the different categories do not properly isolate the different faculties, NOT because there is only a single faculty called intelligence.
 
It's pretty well accepted among cognitive scientists that the parts of the brain that are good at math also are highly affected when listening to enjoyable or beautiful music. There's the Mozart effect, of which copious amounts of literature has been written, which says by listening to music at a young age will have a significant impact on your ability to learn mathematical concepts.
This is indirectly true, according to evidence, because while it doesn't necessarily have a direct impact on math skills per se, it DOES make the assimilation of any new material easier, especially technical skills on musical instruments, and so, because the brain that has been listening to music at a young age has assimilated new skills of any type more quickly than it would have otherwise overall academic performance has been seen in these children.
While it's impossible to know for sure ANY historical figure's IQ or EI, or any other of the 8 or so noted types of intelligences, there are other ways to approximate someone's intelligence quotient just by the decisions they make and the life they lead. Of course it's usually true that most people don't live fully up to what their IQ may suggest, or some people far exceed their IQ's supposed implications, but an average can be gleaned from the circumstantial evidence that has been collected by biographers and historians. This isn't fool proof by any means, nor do I think the Historians themselves try to claim that it is, but it IS a way to make some sort of rough estimate.
 
Yes, I am near positive that music and math share some of the same portions of the brain, but I dont believe they share all of all cognitive faculties. There is a wide area of overlap, and then they each have additional faculties that are irrelevant to each other.

So, there might be a probability that a talent for one might help the other, but not a guarantee. There is no way to know if the other pieces of the puzzle are there or not....and I suspect that music actually requires more brain than math, but more right brain and left brain combined (if you compose, not just screw around or copy). Math does not require aesthetic taste or imagination to the same degree, and there faculties may or may not be lacking in a math brain.

Also, somebody could play the most beautiful music, yet have a learning disability that would prevent them from composing symphonies or doing complex math, but you would never know it by listening to them play.
 
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