🚀 go-pugleaf

I've been working on some definitions of intelligence for a
forthcoming article and would appreciate comments.  If these seem a
little disjointed, it is because I've excerpted them from a 5,000 word
article.  [Some of this is also covered in the new book, just out: 
Calvin & Ojemann, CONVERSATIONS WITH NEIL'S BRAIN:  The
Neural Nature of Thought and Language (Addison-Wesley 1994)].
                                             William H. Calvin
                                      WCalvin@U.Washington.edu
                            -------
With its connotations of imagination and foresight, intelligence is
more than a clever versatility.  The neurobiologist Horace Barlow says
that it's all about making a guess, one that discovers some new
underlying order:  an appropriate analogy, the logic of an argument,
a pleasing harmony, a witty reply, or what's likely to happen next.
      _Intelligence_ is, of course, one of those open-ended words
such as _consciousness_.  Both concern the high end of our mental
life, but they're frequently confused with more elementary aspects �
and not unreasonably, because they're probably built atop them.  
      A particularly intelligent person often seems "quick" and is
capable of mentally juggling many things simultaneously.  Indeed, the
two strongest influences on an IQ score are how many novel questions
you can answer in a fixed length of time, and how good you are at
mentally manipulating a half-dozen mental images at the same time
� as in those analogy questions:  _A_ is to _B_ as _C_ is to ___
[_D_, _E_, or _F_].
      Versatility is another characteristic, and most animals are
narrow specialists.  They have a suite of basic sensory templates,
things they are "on the lookout for."  These "search images" are semi-
optimized for finding their food and detecting their predators.  On the
output side, they have a repertoire of movements useful for approach
and avoidance.
      Omnivores such as the octopus, crow, bear, and chimpanzee
have more templates and movements to mix and match, and the
cleverest animals play around at making new combinations.  A social
life (which the adult orangutan lacks) allows you to mimic the useful
inventions of others, and it's full of interpersonal problems to solve
while coping with the usual environmental challenges.  Building up a
wide repertoire is also aided by a long life span (which the octopus
lacks).
      Planning more than fifteen minutes ahead is rare and, when
seen, is usually for routine futures such as the approach of winter. 
None of the termite-fishing chimps, Jacob Bronowski observed,
"spends the evening going round and tearing off a nice tidy supply of
a dozen probes for tomorrow."  But short-term planning does allow an
important increment in social intelligence:  one chimp may deceive
another by exploiting his predictable reaction to an initiative. 
      A _unique_ situation requires imagining multiple scenarios,
whether a hunter plotting various approaches to a deer or a futurist
spinning three scenarios bracketing what an industry might look like
in another decade.  We are capable of heeding Edmund Burke's 18th-
century admonition, "The public interest requires doing today those
things that men of intelligence and goodwill would wish, five or ten
years hence, had been done."
      Sometimes, you will hesitate to describe someone as
intelligent, saying, "Well, he's certainly _clever_."  By this, you mean
that he is versatile at improvising in the short run, or talks a good line
� but perhaps lacks longer-term virtues.  Cleverness is a matter of
tactics, but intelligence implies strategy in addition.
      Many animal species can learn a basic vocabulary of symbols. 
They might not acquire seven new words every day in the spongelike
manner of preschool children, but many animals can learn abstract
representations by simple association.  Categories aren't particularly
human, either.
      Closer to intelligence is the power of analogies, metaphors,
similes, parables, and mental models.  We can mentally operate in a
familiar domain (say, filing a document in a file folder or throwing it
in a wastebasket) and carry this relationship over to a less familiar
domain (say, saving and deleting computer files), perhaps with the aid
of moving icons on a screen.  We can make a gesture in one mental
domain and have it interpreted in another.  These mappings all break
down somewhere and, in Robert Frost's words, we have to know how
far we can ride a metaphor, judge when it's safe.
      And safety is the big problem with trial combinations, probably
the reason why most animals are conservative in this regard.  Even
simple reversals in order can yield dangerous novelty, as in "Look
_after_ you leap."  Humans can simulate future courses of action and
weed out the nonsense off-line.
      An intelligence freed of the necessity of finding food and
avoiding predators might (like artificial intelligence) not need to move
and so lack the what-happens-next orientation of human intelligence. 
We solve movement problems and only later, in both phylogeny and
ontogeny, graduate to ponder more abstract problems.  There may be
other ways in which high intelligence could be achieved, but up-from-
movement is the paradigm.
    William H. Calvin   WCalvin@U.Washington.edu