Intelligence?

Question

We think of ourselves as humans as maybe having the most intelligence on this Earth than any other animal... but is it really intelligence and our intelligence is just directed to building things, creating services and having social intelligence, and maybe a wild animal lives in the wild but they really have organized governments of their own but our intelligence can't pick that up because they have a different type of intelligence...If our intelligence is really the superior intelligence in the world, then is a completely healthy person with an average to high IQ the maximum intelligence goes to? Or is there a much higher form of intelligence that exists that we cant even understand... I'd like to just know some opinions..

Answer 1

There are entire branches of science (artitifical intelligence, cybernetics, the philosophy of mind) dedicated to this question.

Even intelligent design asks some very interesting questions (when it starts providing some testable answers, instead of just questions, then it will be really interesting).

But yes, you have hit the nail on the head with the fact that we are the ones doing the defining of the word "intelligence". This has the danger that we end up with a definitions somewhat like "we don't know what intelligence is, but we know we got it ... therefore 'intelligence' is that thing we got ... to the extent that other animals exhibit something similar to us (the gold standard), we say they have 'intelligence'. And to the extent that we intelligent beings can imagine something like us, but better, that is a supreme intelligence." (Hence the notion of being created "in His image.") And this, of course, is a useless definition of 'intelligence' born out of nothing but arrogance.

The best (and most neutral) definitions of 'intelligence' that I've seen define intelligence in terms of information. It is the ability to create new information. Information itself has a definition based on thermodynamics (the opposite of entropy ... or in a simplistic way, the opposite of disorder).

By this definition, computers cannot be 'intelligent', because they move information, but do not create it. You might think that a computer creates information, but because a computer follows instructions defined carefully by another intelligence (the programmer), it is an illusion to believe that the information it gathers or computes is "new" information. Rather it is information that has been extracted, gathered, or computed from other existing information.

But then we get into the classical debate over whether things like mutations in biology can create "new" information. And obviously they can. So in a sense, life itself is a form of long slow intelligence ... unless of course we amend our definition to place some other requirements on intelligence in order to eliminate the type of information created by natural selection. E.g. it may mean *repeatable* creation of new information.

This is a complex topic that doesn't stay long in biology, but moves on into other fields, such as philosophy.

Answer 2

Intelligence is realative. There will always be something/someone smarter and more capable than us out there and how intellegent some one is depends on what or who they are compared to.....

I like ur theory about the animals and their intelligence. I think what sets our intelligence at a higher level of animals' is that, as you sed, we have more social intelligence and so on....i mean, look at all the complicated languages that developed between humans (the same species) however, in the animal kingdom, more or less the same "language" is used in the same species, and sometimes this language can go from one species to another.

I think there are higher forms of intelligence than us (this may be, however where we drift away from science a bit and go more into religion, but if u belive like me, that God and science go hand in hand, it might not be a prob.) But because the level of their intelligence is so vastly higher than ours, we are not aware of it.

I think animals are aware of us and our intelligence because our intelligence is not so much more higher than theirs as we tend to think.Who knows, they may sometimes even think we are stupid idiots for not understanding what they are trying to tell us. lol. or not understanding the reason for the things they do/ how their societies. Althought, over the years, research has been done and we now understand more and more about the intelligence/their behaviour of animals and how this influences their lives....and ours.

very intersting question.

Answer 3

Intelligence is an illusion, it is a level of complexity which from our perspective is higher in us then in other animals.