Defining 'Intelligence' from a Functional Perspective
What is "intelligence"?
Honestly, I don't know. It's a very abstract thing to think about. Does thinking about intelligence is an intelligent act?
Let's start from common sense. We call something as "intelligent" when... what? I can think of these:
- When it does what it supposed to do.
- When it does something it exactly supposed to do. By that, intelligence is the driver of that act.
Any living cat is supposed to protect its live. A cat living in the street is intelligent when it can avoid harms happening in the street. A cat living in the street is even more intelligent when it can survive in the woods.
I see there are degrees of intelligence.
Something is more intelligent when it can do what it supposed to do, despite the diverse and unknown external condition. The more that it can adapt, the more intelligent it is.
We have two keywords now: goal-achieving, adaptation.
In order for something to achieve its goal, it has to know its own goal itself. It also has to know the steps needed to be taken to get closer to the goal.
In order for something to be adaptable to conditions, it has to perceive the surrounding condition, possibly in multimodal means, then decide the course of actions in order to survive in that condition, given it's initial knowledge, skills, and experiences.
Now we have expanded our concepts:
- goal-setting, the starting indicator of an intelligence act--the ability to achieve goal,
- planning, the ability to lay out sets of course of actions to achieve the goal,
- perception, the ability to see, hear, taste, touch, etc.,
- knowledge processing, translating a knowledge/skill/experience from one domain to another,
- decision making, weighting options for the best course of actions to achieve the goal--based on the plan, perception, and knowledge processed, and
- knowing oneself, above all, to know one's knowledge, skill, and experience, and to know one's limit, and to know the goal itself.
That's all I can think of now. If I have to reorder the concepts, from the seemingly easiest to do as a human being myself, to the hardest one:
- perception
- goal-setting
- decision-making
- planning
- knowing oneself
Given this basis, we might want to talk about The Meaning of Intellectuals.