I am asking you plain and clear, what is human intelligence and if we were to begin to measure it (however vaguely) how would we go about it? Or are you saying we cannot measure it at all and have no idea what it is? and/or, we at best have some vague idea about what capacities intelligence may be founded on?
There is nothing inherently wrong with a test which measures a person's ability to read and follow written directions. That skill is obviously used a lot in academia. A person's academic career will also involve large exams, on pencil and paper, that often count towards a huge percentage of their final grade in a course.
Both aspects could be the plausible causal link for early IQ tests correlating with later achievement in academia. These metrics may be "stable" (as Pinker calls them) and I have no reason to doubt that.
As far as the word "intelligence" being very difficult to define, I would point at the turbulent history of Artificial Intelligence, starting as far back as Alan Turing. I'm not an advocate of any of the perspectives in this list. However, I would point out how quickly and drastically the definitions changed from decade to decade.
- Turing adopted the strong position that intelligence could not possibly be defined. So he invented a clever test where a conversational chat bot would or would not fool a human participant into believing that it is human.
- The earliest conference on AI was attended by lecturers who equivocated algorithmic proof solving with intelligence. The newspaper at the time (1958ish) did report on an early computer that performed this algorith, reporting a "machine that can think."
- For the next few decades, logical reasoning was the sole concentration of AI research. Nobody was working on heuristic statistical methods or neural networks during those years. These years were dominated by a philosophy that reasoning is equal to intelligence.
- In the late 1970s, AI was still saturated with the "reasoning is intelligence" dogma. But they knew it wasn't going anywhere, and so they invented a problem called "Common Sense Reasoning".
- The 1980s and 1990s were typified by algorithms that hoped to achieve machine intelligence by capturing and emulating "Common Sense Reasoning". A lot of the attempts were based heavily around processing language.
- The late 1990s shown an abandonment of reasoning, and a desire to start training neural networks. At this point, the phrase "Strong AI" and "Weak AI" emerged. Weak AI was what we had now, but someday human-level intelligence would be "Strong AI". A number of researchers began to say Strong AI is not possible.
- The 2000s were dominated by "learning". And it was all about mimicking how animals learn by reinforcement. Punishments and rewards. This time was all about "reward functions". Intelligence had been redefined to "ability to learn".
- 2010s. Strong AI was universally abandoned for the phrase AGI. Or "artificial general intelligence". The phrase "narrow AI" was on everyone's tongue. Intelligence was redefined yet again to refer to a kind of ability to succeed in a general sense.
For completeness, the 2010s were dominated by statistical methods, one of which was "Deep Learning" involving training neural networks. The early successes causes many-a-crackpot on the internet to declare that AGI was at-hand. In 2018, no researcher believes that AGI is entirely achievable with deep learning alone.
Even among the highly educated cognitive scientists who swam in the milieu of AI research, the definition of the word "intelligence" slipped, slid, and morphed from decade to decade. It went from
"Impossible to Define" --> Logical reasoning --> Common Sense Reasoning --> Strong AI --> Learning --> AGI
Whatever there is to learn from story is that the safest most stable place to hang one's hat is to admit that "intelligence" is very difficult to define. Our collective definitions of "intelligence" have come and gone like fads and styles through the years. Like clothing fashions that change.
It is unreasonable for a person like me, who having seen the pattern, to sit on my hands when someone comes on a forum and decries
"Intelligence is just complex problem solving."
I gotta tell you how such pontifications come across to my ears and eyes. My first visceral reaction is that I want to smash my face into the desk. Man alive. I wish intelligence was that simple. If only it were
that simple! Such confident assertions sound to me as hokey and ridiculous as some infomercial guy on Saturday morning TV yammering about how has has cured cancer with pomegranate seeds.
I have books on my shelf by the likes of Eichenbaum and Gerald Edelman. There are aspects of intelligence that are intertwined with the deeper problems of memory and consciousness. Problems which are not even attempted to be breached by AI researchers. After 60 years, the very upper esch of AI researchers have started using words like "Intuition" again. When you try to design AI, there are horrible problems related to something called attentional awareness -- this is where the subconscious tells you which part of a scene to ignore and which parts to turn your eyes to. We don't know how the human brain does this without having some part of our brain "knowing" what it is not yet looking at.
Episodic memory is completely out of reach for even the most sophisticated AI agents. How do we know this? Because episodic memory is invariably where the agents fail when they do fail to be good at Atari games. (cr.
https://deepmind.com/ )
Episodic memory is not solved by storing the entire agent's life in a giant video reel. For the problems of biographical memory are not storage and retrieval. The problems is, which episode in my past is relevant to what I am experiencing here and now? And what can I glean from that one-off event that informs my behavior now? How do I compare, contrast and analogize among moments of my existence? What is the start and end of an "episode", anyway?
The human brain handles this all effortlessly "under the hood" without any conscious mental effort on our part.
But what exactly do we mean by "conscious mental effort"? There is automatic functions of the brain, and there are non-automatic uhh..
conscious (?) functions. Why? Why such a segregation? Is there a cognitive/functional reason for the segregation of automatic versus conscious, or is this is an accident of the evolution of our species?
I wish I knew. But I don't. Nobody does.
Edelman and Eichenbaum's books go a long way towards addressing some of these questions.. the relevance problem of episodic memory has some plausible solutions. We know that the neurons which are active when you swam in your aunt's pond in 1994 are the same neurons that become active when you recall that event years later. Our brain's regions do not seem to segregate active neurons in the present moment with ones used during recall from memory.
"It copies the consciousness stuff from the awareness areas into long-term memory storage areas.". No. That is a bad theory. The data strongly suggests this never happens. So this is tricky : Your brain does not "know" which episodes correspond to the present moment, rather it 'associates" the relevant episodes by re-igniting those activation patterns because the cell networks are already in that configuration to begin with. There is no separate mental step of "Take X and analogize with Y". This could explain why recall of the 1994 swim comes to us... automatically ... effortlessly.
"Well if the brain performs such analogies it must be using huge networks of neurons to perform the analogizing computation in the occipital cortex in layers 3 and 7." No. Not even close. That is totally wrong. A theory like that isn't even half right.
It would be convenient if we could identify those functional brain areas that correspond to
the I "
The I that is aware and conscious" versus the "part of me that automatically steers the car down the road while I'm distracted by the radio." Neuroscience has not found any regional segregation between these two things.
The hot-off-the-press research on this is suggesting that the difference between consciously-aware and automatically-walk-chew-gum has something to do with the modes of firing of large neuronal groups. Where "modes of firing" refers to things like alpha and beta waves. (cr.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network )
An analogy with computer RAM helps here. Computers utilize their RAM by loading and unloading programs and this is done by taking the same bits previously used by programA, and using those bit locations again at a later time for programB. In contrast, the brain may be 'reusing space' in the neurons by activating the very same networks at different regimes of spiking rates.
I don't know what to make of all this. I'm really cynical about this idea that the organ in our head is some kind of problem-solving machine. Why solve a problem at all if you are not motivated to solve problems?
This situation with our brains is more like nature has given this thing in our bodies.. this brain... which is supposed to keep us interested and engaged in the environment around us, because we are warm-blooded and we must eat and socialize and farm and baby-make. SO it makes us "feel". And when we "feel" we have "skin in the game" and so we are motivated. Whether it be by future rewards... sexual attraction, fear of death... social guilt. A need to feel welcomed and part of a group. You name it.
I look at animals who run around naked and are driven to prototypical behavior by instincts. These protypical behaviors of hunt and mate and fight for territory. They are evolved strategies for survival. The human situation with the big brain is more like rationality is "kept away just outside the gate" far enough away that motivation emotion and fear run the show.
We're typing at each other on a forum. We are socializing using the tools of the internet and this choppy english language invented by conjuncting Germanic tribal speak with civilized French words. I cannot believe a 45-minute pencil and paper test could even possibly measure your ability to take in reems of information in a fast-moving graduate course at a university and "digest it all" over several months. You're just not going to test that in 45 minutes. So I could pontificate in the new fashionable style of defining "intelligence" as the "ability to take in lots of information really fast and integrate it all". Then we can chase down that fashionable theory until another one usurps it, and the latest fads in
cog sci swing another direction.
What is this? Out of fear or discomfort with a complex topic, we want to reduce to a single number. A single Intelligence Quotient to measure some thing about ourselves. We need to be asking what the motivation for this in the first place --- Are measuring the efficacy of the brain organ? But there is no efficacy here. "Complex problem solving" is a fashion that "rings as smartness" because we live in an era where the richest most successful people are information techies like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. They strike us as "probelm solving dudes". So we associate the "complex problem solving" of the "Tech Giant" with smartness, because that's where are culture and history are RIGHT NOW.
If this were 347 BC... we would associate "intelligent men" with stone masons who build floors or what have you. I'm sure if were in Macedonian Greece, "Smartness" would be associated with warfare and killing and success in military campaigns.
Are we here to figure out what the homo sapien has in its head that the horse does not? Or the fine difference between the homo sapien mental tricks versus the orangutan mental tricks? Versus the dolphin..and so on.
Homo sapien is what? He is conscious of moral dilemmas. He is vengeful when he perceives a social wrong. You can kick a dog and will cower when you try to kick it again. But the dog will not plot its revenge on you for the next 11 days.
"The victims of social injustice deserve recompense for their past bad treatment."
We find such things compelling as homo sapiens. The gorillas and bears do not. This is what we have that the animals do not. Guilt. Embarrassment. Sense of social karma requiring balance with revenge and punishment.
THESE , my friend. THESE are what is being produced by the human brain. The brain is not a mere "problem-solving machine" and every other brain in nature is a "problem-solving machine" just that we solve problems better and therefore we "score higher on the test". This is silly. It's cultural and provencial. It's a reflection of our current society not a reflection of objective scientific truth.
What is in the
Hearts of Minds of men is really what is being processed by his brain. And you and I everyone else here is surrounded by a civil society and civilization that does have courts, and police, and laws and economics and money and exchange and social castes determined by sectors of economic activity and medicine, military , educational, and private sectors. This is what the brain is doing. The thing in our heads is a mere inert organ that
processes problem-solve stuff? Really?
It is far more than that. It contains our emotions, or motivational pathways, our fear and our orgasms and that feeling in your stomach when you haven't eaten and a sense of loneliness or comradery and our hopes for the future and fears and our personality and our past and our biography. The brain is the seat of all human instincts and rest assured we have them and they are particular to us.
We are machines that "solve problems"? Wake up and look out your window. You think you are some kind of robot that manipulates triangles shapes on an IQ test?
Are you even alive? Reach into your pants and feel the sweat on your skin. Poke your skin with a needle and get warm blood on yourself. Do you feel something about that? What do you think is doing the "Feeling" stuff there? IS it maybe that "problem solving machine" in your head?
Yeah. Now you're getting it. You don't want to do that ? Those
wants are not coming from organ in your abdomen. They are happening in your brain.
Humans dream. We humans plan. We speculate about things that could happen that never happened. We imagine ourselves in scenarios. We are pulled into literature and movies and fictional characters, and live in those imaginary realms. The organ in our heads can imagine black holes and how they would work without ever coming within millions of miles of one.
All this. All this complexity. This imagination. These feelings of moral wrongness and guilt. All the giant capacity of this human brain organ and its life and hopes and family and political feelings and personality. All this is wider than the sky.
ALL OF THIS -- and you come nancing on some internet forum to tell us that the brain is nothing but some inert pithy little "problem-solving machine" As simple and circumscribable as an inert office printer in the corner of some secretary's office. And it can be perfectly described by one horsepower-like metric called IQ.
Are you for real?
If you are going to continue to investigate this hyper-reductionistic autistic-spectrum-disorder reduction of man to a problem-solving office machine : then you have vastly underestimated your fellow humans. I feel sorry for you. I am sorry that your life is so screwed up that you think you are a machine in the corner of an office whose entire purpose in the vast universe is to "problem-solve".
I'm sorry you are so isolated and cut off from the vast experience that is human life.
THE BRAIN is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.
The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.
The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.