What is Intelligence?

"SE-I" Definition of Intelligence: 

 Intelligence, to our mind, is the art of rapid and reliable gist-finding, crux-spotting, bull’s-eye-hitting, nub-striking, essence-pinpointing. It is the art of, when one is facing a new situation, swiftly and surely homing in on an insightful precedent (or family of precedents) stored in the recesses of one’s memory. That, no more and no less, is what it means to isolate the crux of a new situation. And this is nothing but the ability to find close analogues, which is to say, the ability to come up with strong and useful analogies. 

 - "Surfaces and Essences" 

This is a working definition of intelligence provided by the two authors, who are (not surprisingly) stunningly intelligent by their own definition. The book is itself a massive collection of strong and useful analogies.

IQ

The "man on the street" more or less equates "intelligence" with IQ. It's something people "have", like their height. And, like height, it can be "measured" by a test. There are problems with this idea.

As a reminder, let's take a glance at typical questions on an IQ test:

Some tests consist entirely of questions like the first two examples. These tests are timed. Anyone seeing such questions for the first time may be excused for taking the whole time to figure out the format. The second question assumes numerical literacy beyond that available to 20% to 30% of the American population - mainly because of the American educational system. I have asked a few of my friends for the answer to the last question. I got it wrong twice and nobody I know got it right the first time. What I'd say in general, is that such questions "test" our ability to answer such questions. They "test" our ability to spot surface analogies. Computers are great at that. Check out typical "analogy" questions from a real IQ test to see this. For those who live with Google at our elbow, it is easy to imagine a computer program blowing this test away; this is what happens. Try it yourself. Ask Google "left is to right as vertical is ". Google will autocomplete "vertical". You might be less impressed if you ask Google why that's the right answer.

Even for its advocates, IQ is supposed to be correlated with "G-General Intelligence" - a slippery aspect of mental capacity that is assumed to be real but cannot be tested directly. The existence of "G" is taken for granted. As we will see, SE challenges this assumption subtly. We expect SE to correlate with IQ in some ways (such as in "verbal reasoning" tests), but it is difficult to come up with a test for SE-I (not impossible). But SE-I is unlike "G" (and therefore IQ) in several ways:

• Nothing is preventing an individual from increasing SE-I over a lifetime. In fact, it is a rare individual who does not increase his/her SE-I over a lifetime or even a week. IQ (and G) are supposed to be stable of a lifetime - imagined to be a property of the individual brain.
• IQ (and G) are supposed to be independent of culture. Great efforts are made to remove cultural "bias" from IQ tests (one reason why "verbal reasoning" is often omitted entirely from IQ tests). SE-I, on the other hand, strongly depends on culture. In fact, SE will increase as the culture itself becomes "smarter". This agrees with the Flynn Effect, which documents that IQ is a moving target - people are doing better on IQ tests as time goes on (5 points every 20 years). This fact alone shows that there is something seriously wrong with IQ and the assumptions behind it - namely that "G" is a stable measure of individual intelligence. 
• SE-I gives hints about how to "test" for intelligence, and, in fact, IQ tests are all about the ability of the individual to detect analogies. However, these analogies are what SE-I would call "superficial". IQ tests do not test The ability to develop "strong and useful" analogies. For example, knowing that "vertical is to horizontal as left is to right" is true but not particularly useful or powerful.
• In fact, IQ scores can vary wildly for individuals (my own varies by 35 points depending on the type of test and my mood). Most people will remember their highest score (or imagine they would get), resulting in the phenomenon that most people think of themselves as "above average" IQ-wise. This is statistically impossible of course, since, by definition, 50% of the population is below average.

As we will see, SE-I has a few powerful implications that leave the IQ concept on the scrap heap. More than that, we will see that SE explains why IQ has so many problems. It turns out that the assumption that G is an individual, measurable property is wrong too.

To see why our ideas of intelligence are circling the drain, ask Google "Is Donald Trump Intelligent"? SE-I provides an immediate and obvious answer. Does IQ help at all?  Many commentators, including Trump, assume IQ "is" intelligence. Conceding that point to Trump, the discussion becomes a food fight about the failure of IQ to "define" what people mean by intelligence. SE-I can step into the gap and helpfully point out what we all understand about the intelligence of the President.

The SE-I approach can usefully "put the finger" on the "nub of the matter" - Trump's inability to productively and usefully employ a rich set of analogies in his decision-making. The fact that he makes no use of the massive resources of the Central Intelligence Agency is also relevant. This is frequently because he uses the wrong "frame" for the issue. As we will see, SE-I intelligence is not an attribute of one person or, if it is, a person who isolates himself from others is the SE-I equivalent of a moron, not the least because he doesn't understand what intelligence is.

WHAT KINDS OF ENTITIES CAN BE INTELLIGENT?

IQ was invented to sort out recruits for the military. Who is smart enough to pull the trigger. Who is smart enough to fly an aircraft? The project was all about individual selection. Subsequent attempts to rescue the concept from blatant cultural bias have, as we will see, stripped IQ of any claim to legitimacy - in fact, bringing IQ farther and farther from SE and the sister concept of "G".

INDIVIDUAL "IQ"

Attempts to strip "culture" from IQ have forced IQ test to blatantly "measure" ability to do well on IQ tests. Tests focus on the interpretation of abstract figures and numbers - something that is assumed to correlate with"G" - an assumption that depends on the existence of G in the first place. A useful analogy may help. Suppose we have a measure called IH - general health quotient. We mark it on the curve, like IQ and "measure" it by getting the individual to run a 100-yard dash. That will correlate well with the vague concept of "health" but obviously leaves out a lot of factors that anyone would recognize as health-related. More to the point, anyone would recognize that a single number, marked on the curve, is a silly way to measure "health". But that is exactly how IQ "measures" intelligence - a concept that we all know in our hearts to be vastly complex. In fact, we all assume that complexity when we claim to be intelligent despite unremarkable IQ.

GROUP IQ

It is a common experience - in fact, built into the way society actually functions - that "two heads are better than one". Mathematically, it is obvious that an IQ test performed by two people will result in a higher score than either individual could achieve. This is easy and fun to test. For an IQ test, this is "cheating". But nothing is preventing SE-I from describing the ability of a group to "come up with strong and useful analogies". More precisely, the SE-I concept can be used to observe the effect of adding expertise to a group (Surfaces and Essences has a powerful definition of "expertise" that I will discuss later). My experience working with many smart people is that coming up with strong and useful analogies has always involved other people.

CULTURAL AND LANGUAGE IQ

Obviously, the ability to "come up with strong and useful analogies" depends on what sorts of situations a person (or group) knows about that are "like" a new situation. To cite an obvious example, if the group is fully comfortable with mathematical concepts, it can come up with analogies involving space and time. Knowing 30,000 words of a 700,000-word language (along with the multiple meanings of many words) is an advantage - a vast collection of analogies "built-in" to the language. Don't we assume that a University education will make us "smarter"? And how, exactly, does that work? Is it not by broadening our resources of useful analogies? That means that culture and language not only contribute to "group SE" but that we may speak of the culture and language itself as having a "high SE-I"

If there is a single theme in "Surfaces and Essences", it is the richness of language itself - we are "swimming in a sea of analogies". And the sea grows wider and deeper by the minute.

COMPUTERS

"Artificial Intelligence" is all the rage these days. But what does "intelligence" mean. My experience as a programmer, including in the field of Artificial Intelligence, tells me that it would be easy to write a program that aces every IQ test thrown at it. Many "experts" have claimed that this result has already been achieved. Of course, the problem with this claim is that IQ is not defined for anything but an individual human's performance relative to a large population of humans taking the same or similar test. A computer IQ might hypothetically compare one computer (say an iPhone with a specific set of apps and options) to the performance of a population of other iPhones with the same apps. The results would not be impressive since we would expect all of the iPhones to perform identically.

The SE-I concept escapes the limitations imposed by the statistical definition of IQ. As we have already seen, it makes sense to talk about the SE-I "intelligence" of a language or culture. Computer applications like Google Search provide access to a large subset of human knowledge. Someone with access to Google Search will do better than someone without such access on an essay question involving what we would call "creativity".

To illustrate this point, imagine Joe is a student in High School. He has been assigned to write an essay on the topic "Why is love like a rose?". He pulls out his iPhone and asks Google:  "Why is love like a rose?" On the first page of results, we find this poem by Phil Panebianco:

Love is like a rose, when it blossoms it's so new and fresh.Each petal is so beautiful and soft.Each petal holds something special, the good times, the bad times, the times we wished never happened and the time that have yet to be written.But like a roses thorns, love can hurt too.In time we manage to ease the pain, but never forget how good the rose felt to have. We always want more.A rose is a sign of love, a sign of caring.It's lets us know someone is thinking about us.A rose last a long time, but true love never dies.You hold it in your heart forever.You cherish it with all your heart and soul.Roses can come and go, but you only get one true love of your life and that true love is you.Always has been, always will be.

That's a pretty good answer. Of course, our student cannot directly use it (that would be "plagiarism"), but the poem delves deeply into the analogy in question. In Joe's mind, the analogy makes more sense. Perhaps at that point, he will delve into his own experience to find something "like" what is described in the poem. Maybe all he can come up with is his love of his dog. Maybe not. In both cases, Joe is 

 facing a new situation, swiftly and surely homing in on an insightful precedent (or family of precedents) stored in the recesses of one’s memory. That, no more and no less, is what it means to isolate the crux of a new situation. And this is nothing but the ability to find close analogues, which is to say, the ability to come up with strong and useful analogies

Something is going on here that seems a lot like SE-I intelligence. But who or what is "intelligent"? SE-I does not constrain us to answer (a) the student, (b) Phil Panebianco (c) Google (d) the student's iPhone. The answer is "all of the above". SE-I even gives us a clue about how to parse the contributions of each choice. It should be pointed out that Joe has dozens of other suggestions from Google, allowing him to dig around until he finds something that "clicks". In any case, he should come out with a better understanding of the idea and a better ability to communicate the idea. It's also true that our list (a) ... (d) does not exhaust the possibilities. Some credit must be given to the teacher, the school and the English Language. Sometimes "intelligence" consists of asking an intelligent question.

We can draw a "strong and useful analogy" by looking more closely at option (a) above. Would that answer be correct about the student or a combination of systems in the student's brain? If it's a combination of systems, why exclude Joe's iPhone?

BRAIN SYSTEMS

SE-I can "drill down" on individual brains and assess "intelligence" of brain systems. Consider the visual system. Without going into excessive detail, the function of this system is to extract "meaningful" information from a stream of input from the eyes. The "hardware" of this system manages to extract a stunning array of "strong and useful analogies" - a fact that becomes more and more obvious as we try to duplicate this system to create self-driving cars:

• We "see" 3 dimensions when we are actually looking at a pair of 2-dimensional arrays
• We "see" a thousand colours when we actually see 3 analog measures of the intensity of 3 colours.
• We "see" the world as filled with objects: desks, doors, floors, trees, dogs ...

And so forth ...

In Joe's case, we can include the stunning capability of his visual system, plus his hard-won ability to read, plus his ability to understand language, plus the language itself.

DOGS

"Surfaces and Essences" provides us with a long list of categories and analogies recognized by a dog owned by one of the authors. The list is impressively long (something that irritates some readers of the book), but conclusively demonstrates the usefulness of the SE-I concept. Dogs have an SE-I that is well into the "plus" range and comparable to human SE-I. Using SE-I, it makes sense to ask if dogs are "as smart" as humans. IQ is no help here since, by definition, IQ applies only to humans.

CONCLUSION

Visitors to this blog will spot my prejudice for regarding "mind" as a "distributed" phenomenon. The idea of intelligence, like the idea of  "mind", makes sense when applied at many scales from the cell to human society. The boundaries of mind extend deeply into the "real world" of our creations, environment and our socially-determined interpretation of that environment. Our habit of regarding mind as something going on in the brain of one person is preventing us from seeing the "big picture": the essence of mind.

SE-I is itself a concept, an idea based on analogy. "Surfaces and Essences" claims that all ideas are based on analogy. I have provided a few examples of the category (hundreds more could be provided). The aim is to define SE-I as a category - what a friend calls something you "know it when you see it". We really need to let go of our idea that intelligence as what an intelligence tests measures or "correlates" with G. SE-I is a definition, not a statistical construct. "Surfaces and Essences" educates us to expect something a bit different in the way of a "definition". Instead of what we'd find in a dictionary or a geometry textbook, we are being shown the situations where the idea of SE-I applies. We are being educated to use the word "intelligence" in a way that turns out to be much closer to how we usually use it - not as a synonym for "IQ".

SE-I allows us to think productively about intelligence. It provides us with "strong and useful analogies". In fact, understanding SE-I itself makes us smarter! We could expect no more from the authors of SE-I.

= PS. In 2023, AI became available to the average person in many forms, most notably CHAT-GPT, which is available as an iPhone app at the time of writing. This is how CHAT-GPT answers the question, Why is love like a rose:

Love is often compared to a rose because both can be beautiful, delicate, and yet capable of causing pain. Just as a rose's thorns can prick you, love can bring both joy and heartache. Love, like a rose, can be enchanting and captivating, but it also requires care and attention to flourish. Just as a rose needs nurturing to bloom, love requires effort, understanding, and compromise to thrive.