The need to define intelligence as our capacity for logic/math/language/technology is so strong in us, it carried over into a discussion on artificial intelligence, a term that merely perpetuates the definition, "begging the question."
If you begin with that definition, congratulations. You're smarter than other animals.
But what is attracting my attention, why I'm interested in this discussion, is that there are more ways to define intelligence. What are those? And why are some behavioral scientists saying, "No. You're not necessarily smarter. There are other kinds of intelligence. Some animals are on a par with you, but their intelligence is different."
Stop thinking of cars, buildings, rockets and computers. Those are demonstrations, products, of *human* intelligence.
Our evolution turned us into "story telling" animals. Our languages used to tell the stories include language, math and music. Our stories are our arts, religions and sciences. We still react to some things directly as the result of "stimulus-response." But more than any other animal, we routinely run experience through a process of perceptual interpretation first. We want to know its story. We compare it other stories we know. How does it fit. What does it mean.
And we can imagine new stories. That power of imagination *is* fundamental to story telling ability. We don't just learn, we compare, evaluate, predict, theorize, hypothesize. We call them higher order thinking skills. And while we aren't entirely alone as a species in some of these capabilities, a lot of individuals in our species have great facility with them, unmatched by other species.
We once distinguished ourselves as the "language-using" animals. So what? Other animals use language, and some animal languages are mind-bogglingly complex.
Then we refined it, calling ourselves the "symbol using" animals, capable of written speech and mathematical formulas -- Until we learned other animals can see/read/interpret symbols, too. And they can invent new ways to express names they had not been taught. So ... what?
I've always preferred to think of us as the "story telling" animals. And as humans, everything we experience in the world is forced into a story shape -- beginning, middle, end; pattern and moral/conclusion." The result were stories. Religion is a story. History is told as stories. God is a story. Science is a story. But they're all just "stories." Competing stories.
We need stories to make our lives to "make sense." And we bend over bass-ackward to get it our stories to work out. To justify our behavior. Even to justify interspecies sex, humans mating with animals.
But our stories begin with a presumption the universe makes sense. Does it?
My dog could give a rat's ass if the universe has dimensions or a creator. He does not waste time or resources trying to figure out if time travel is possible -- traveling through something that is a manmade concept to measure change and exists only as a theory with fragmentary, coincidental evidence.
What if there is no god. What if there is no beginning or end? What if it's just *us* forcing our "intellectual preferences" upon the universe at large? The universe (and then earth itself) are continually changing so slowly, it really doesn't make sense to invest so much in making sense of it.
And to ponder these things is a relic of just one *kind* of intelligence. It's also a sign of its limitations, right? It where our intelligence goes dumb.
Humans HAVE to find the beginning and the end. It's worked for them short term so it's the fundamental presumption for everything. They've learned to pay their bills to have heat and internet access to the end of the pay period. They know *how* to log in to the internet to access email, surf the Web, and (some of us "boomers") how to use Usenet. They've got a lot of the kinks worked out recreating the history of the plant. They think they're pretty close to figuring out the origins of the solar system -- though they're still trying to define "planet."
They've found ways to empty their own planet of hydrocarbon fuel resources and put them to use getting around and keeping warm and manufacturing things they've designed. Not as the most clever of apes, but as a distinctly different kind of animal -- with its own unique kind of intelligence.
But its the kind of intelligence that depends on beginnings and ends -- leading most of us to ponder about every kind of "beginning" and "end" -- the end of our own lives. The end of the earth. The end of the universe.
All things have to have a beginning and an end!
They really don't, do they. Beginning and end are *also* artificial, manmade concepts. Wherever we mark a "beginning" or "end" is arbitrary, a convenience for starting and stopping a story. We reach into the time continuum (another manmade concept necessary to mark select points of a story) and say, "Here. Call this the beginning. And here. Call this the end."
In reality, there is always one more thing before, and another. And in reality, the past no longer exists and the future doesn't exist yet. They are *not* reality any more. Reality is only ever "now." "Eternity" is only ever
now, a continuous string of now, regardless of what has changed. Where did *you* begin? Were you a spirit or ball of energy before your conception? Don't start me down this road. I'll go frickin' insane! (Which, by the way, is no longer a possibility. The concept of "insanity" is archaic. Psychology realizes there is no such thing as insanity. If your brain is fully developed and functioning, you're just telling your story differently that some of us would. No one's story is superior to another's, they're telling us now).
The need for a beginning and an end has made most humans give up their "god story," because an eternal being no longer fits with the rest of the story. God doesn't have a beginning or an end. Nor does that story fit with modern gender politics. Why a man? Why a father? Why a parent-type? And maybe, MAYBE a god created earth -- if you don't know anything about the vastness of the universe. Then where does a god fit?
Your dog is immune to these story limitations. As is a gorilla or orangutang. They are not "intellectual" creatures. They are not limited by stories built from artificial connections or told as religion or science, problems that need finite,
conclusive resolutions. Animal intelligences are different kinds. Can we as humans even begin to comprehend them?
Well, not if we keep saying intelligence is defined as ability to invent, use and converse about math and science -- "human" intelligence. That's just us saying animals ain't smart as humans because animals ain't us.
Think I'll go do more searching. What *are* these comparative behaviorists telling us? I'm going to get this. I really am. I consider myself at least *that* intelligent! (but maybe not)
