Intelligence

I’m going to post a link to a video by Neil deGrass Tyson upfront just so I don’t forget later. I’m going to be paraphrasing parts of this to bolster my point, but he really does verbalize my points better than I ever could. Do yourself a favour, go check the video out. Also, I watched a bit of his back catalogue and I feel like a moron now. Do so at your own risk.

In the video linked above, Neil talks about how we defined intelligence, so we dictate what it looks like. It got me wondering if we were right in doing so. I realize that the questioning of that brings up only more questions, but I just wonder what we discount to keep ourselves on the high end of the scale that we manufactured.

We say intelligence is defined, in part by, our ability to converse and illustrate ideas. The issue with using that as a barometer is that we have, as a species, defined what conversation and a sharing of ideas even looks like. To say something is not intelligent negates every possible “advantage” that we have never even considered.

I could get into the idea of a soul, general consciousness, and things of that elk. Fortunately (unfortunately?) I don’t even pretend to have answers to those. Religion used to exclusively have perceived answers, and people now pretend that they have grander explanations. Luckily for you, I don’t even pretend too have answers. I don’t even have an idea how to go about answering the question of intelligence and how it could be defined anyway that has not been prescribed by humans.