What is “Intelligence” exactly?
[thoughts from ~burning woman~ by Sha’Tara]
That’s a very good question for today because with the tidal wave movement of science and technology, the concept is being both cornered and trivialized. Science and its believers – I can see now that “Science” has become more a religion than a discipline – would have people believe that they are nothing more than machines; some machines working better than others. So we have entered into the age of technocracy. A person’s worth, value, capabilities and capacities can be measured and tested by mechanical means. There is no need to interject anything else to muddy this clean black and white equation.
This is nothing new, of course, but now it’s become endemic and the “testing” never seems to end. Each move a person makes, from kindergarten to applying for positions in the work place or office space requires some sort of test. Even TV and computer games are tests of choices made based on rote learned moves, preferences, emotional reactions and of course tactile abilities. And it’s all highly competitive and combative. That’s man’s brave new world – endless competition when no need exists to practice such; endless war to satisfy the Earthian’s most basic lust to kill, a lust that even surpasses his sexual appetite much of the time.
Yes, the technocrats know just where the pressure points are located within society and they are pressing those for all they’re worth at this time. Justification: there’s money and power in it, what else matters?
Since time immemorial there have always been those ruling classes who believed – and therefore made it truth – that their class was obviously and of necessity more intelligent and superior to the intelligence of those over whom they ruled. Many “civilized” societies had serious punishments for any member of a lower class who dared teach itself, or another, to read or write. History preserves this fact. In today’s politically correct environment it wouldn’t do to be so crass in stating one’s class is mentally and morally superior to other classes. That however doesn’t mean anything has changed. What Technocracy has done is shift the focus slightly, from blatant class distinction to mental abilities, or measurement of some chosen people’s IQ. They simply created another “ruling” class using certain innate abilities in a small percentage of the population. One of many establishments created and developed for this purpose is called Mensa, a group that essentially “measures “intelligence” and makes it look not only fun, but a legitimate enterprise. They even get charitable status – how about that?
And this brings up the point: how do you measure intelligence? With a piece of paper and a bunch of trick questions and a scoreboard? With a pre-programmed computer? If that is the case then pretty soon Mensa will be peopled with computers. Computers can now “read” and “talk” as well as add and subtract. As far as technocrats are concerned, that plus speed and an unwavering propensity to follow orders and guidelines defines intelligence.
Could that be why the world is increasingly flirting on the edge of economic and environmental disaster? A computer, or measured brains, doesn’t rely on common sense or good old horse sense to solve problems. It has no experience to deal with problematic situations that express a whole gamut of mental approaches to problem solving, not to mention technocracy’s bug-bear: morality. How does a computer make a moral decision?
So the question shifts in emphasis from describing intelligence to first determining if “man” is an intelligent or moral being… or both? If both, how are these reconciled in problem solving?
Your company has just successfully bid on 50,000 acres of rainforest to be logged, then planted with GMO crops. As head of R&D you put your bean-counters with computers to work on how best to approach the problem of clearing the land of unwanted population, logging the land, then draining it and planting it. This is your cost-benefit scenario. Will your bean counters and computers refuse to proceed until you have given them a clear moral-based clearance that it’s socially and environmentally, not only proper but advantageous to society in general, and to the planet, to proceed in destroying 50,000 acres of rain forest and its indigenous populations, people and others, to plant toxic crops?
“Measured” intelligence has no moral qualms about such things. It deals in numbers because it sees itself as a number, being itself a measured item. It’s a machine dealing with numbers. And it follows Science’s own boast that all of life can be explained mathematically; that mathematics is the “universal language.”
Technocracy’s approach to “measuring” all of life is either a bald-faced lie… or abysmal ignorance. It knows nothing of what an intelligent being actually consists of, mainly because it denies consciousness. Intelligence isn’t about how fast you can add 2.8955 to the square root of 86. If it is, then computers are intelligent, the vast majority of mankind isn’t. So how did man get “here” from “there” if intelligence only appeared with the ability to do simple arithmetic?
The only reason technocrats have bastardized the concept of intelligence is because real intelligence makes their simplistic and idiotic concepts look, well, simplistic and idiotic. It’s difficult to make yourself taken seriously if you tell the truth about this, so you eliminate all the annoying non-conforming evidence, all that doesn’t fit your concept, and write up new rules that exactly fit your new evidence. And who’s going to see through this? Certainly not someone with an i-phone stuck to the palm of their hand or eyes glazed from computer gaming.
However, no matter how intelligent we think the computer technology is, and the science that goes behind it, humans are still the most intelligent beings of all because it is the humans who are creating these machines that calculate the numbers and the logic in the machines.
Sandie
I tend to be optimistic like Arthur C. Clarke about humanity. Initially, our intelligence grew, like all creatures, in the food chain of hunting and gathering, because the most intelligent survived long enough to reproduce between about the age of 15 to 20, and then were able care for our children until they could survive on their own at about 15 years of age before we died of various ailments and injuries before 30. Natural selection like this depended upon both intelligence and chance, but intelligence eventually won out and was passed on genetically to the next generation. Once we started farming and domesticated animals… Creating villages and, eventually, civilization (an oxymoron?) we left the day-to-day fear of our environment and killing for food and turned survival over to the system or matrix, as you call it. The chiefs, seers, and ruling families.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote that humanity could expand its numbers outward from the earth exponentially, consuming resources available, indefinitely. We certainly seem to be reaching the limits of our earth right now. All the more reason to leave it and to transform ourselves, as I have written, into more intelligent (and more moral) beings for the challenges ahead in outer space.
First, we must solve our earthly problems. I am quite encouraged because I've noticed that simple petitions on the Internet have changed government and corporate policies overnight many times in the past year, circumventing the very slow process of traditional power structure change.
Ron
Love ya!
Jane