Born to do Math 153 – The Heart of Intelligence
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/01/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is – and I am kind of embarrassed as I don’t think I have ever asked this to you directly – the heart of intelligence, ignoring tests and such?
Rosner: The first answer is, “How do you even know there is a heart of intelligence?” There is something in the realm of IQ testing and intelligence testing. There is a concept called g, which stands for “general intelligence.” You could and people do debate whether g even exists.
We infer general intelligence from people’s performances on specific tasks. There’s no such thing as general intelligence tasks. Everything is a specific thing: the eloquence of speech, skill at math, social skills, all the little tasks measured by or tested by an IQ test like how fast you can circle all the stars on a sheet of paper where 1/5th of the symbols are stars.
What is missing in this picture taking blocks and making shapes out of them? Taking all those tasks, we are supposed to get an idea of someone’s general intelligence. You could argue there is no such thing as general intelligence because our brains are adapted for doing the things that we need to do in our specific environments in this specific world.
That’s a pretty extreme argument to make because of 2+2=4, regardless of which galaxy you live in. There should be some really basic forms of thought. You should be able to figure out some kind of criteria for general intelligence.
Jacobsen: Ron Hoeflin has a theory on that. The Categories of Thought, his encyclopedia of philosophy.
Rosner: Ron has spent more than 40 years cataloguing philosophies. I didn’t know it was a catalogue of ways of thought. That’s pretty interesting as it’s thousands of pages long.
To get at what intelligence might be, one of the primary tasks of thought is to form associations, to define things in our experience by what characteristics they have, which is a form of linking. That we know a dog is a dog because we’ve defined in our heads what characteristics are associated with dogs, say versus cats.
Size, fur, shape of ears, I like to say the brain is an association engine.
Jacobsen: What do you mean by that?
Rosner: Intelligence, you could argue, is involved in the accuracy and profundity of the associations formed. Are you able to get to the heart of things or analyze what is going on and get to the/find the essentials?
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 