h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This entry seems to define intelligence only as a measurable quantity of 'something', and does not define what that 'something' is. Perhaps it requires some discussion of sentience, self-awareness, the ability to learn and the ability to adapt to one's environment. Once intelligence is defined in a more scientific manner, it is possible to discuss intelligence measurement. Bear in mind that intelligence is displayed in more animals than just primates - look for some resources on the experiments done on squid and octopi.

Hope you find this useful.

I agree, it does define it as "a generalised measurable quantity or something", and a better definition would be wonderfull, the only problem is that I have yet to be able to find one. General intelligence does seem to corelate with thinking speed, and if you can get a reliable figure for it, you can measure it directly, but not so for the specific intelligences.

Even people working at the hight of the field like Dr Susan Greenfield have a problem in defining it.

I know about some of the other animals (dogs, parrots, dolphins) but I had only heard about the squids once, and had then forgotten them. The animal intelligence entry is deliberately sparse at the moment, as it is going to be one of the hardest to do anything with, and I don't want to put things that are blatantly wrong into it. I mentioned washo and panbanisha because you can type them into search engines and find something out, so it is better than having nothing.

I have always really liked the old definition: that is, the ability to know things. The more you know the more intelligent you are. Clearly then, ontology and semiotics come into play to distinguish between storage and knowledge.

Knowledge free IQ tests know doubt mean something to those who work with them but they are not the test I use when meeting people in the pub, or teaching students at Uni or when interviewing others for jobs (in as much as one ever "tests" these things...)

PT

(PS this is the first contribution I have made to a public forum in nearly three months of lurking.)

welcome, and what a place to make your first posting.
the tests split into knowledge free and knowledge dependant, but of course that is a scale, not a binary choice.

The problem with the knowledge dependant tests is that if you assume (like the original testers did) that every inteligent person has read the classics, when you find groups that are intelligent, but have not read the classics, your test not only gives wrong resuts, it gives blatantly wrong results.

It is just one of the sources of error in intelligence testing, and trying to eradicate that sort of bias is definately one of the harder parts of test design.

When you start accepting "the ability to know things", you open up a can of worm that includes various obscure (some would say crank) sciences like general semantics, and nexialism, to name just two.

This is part of the reason that I wrote this page in this manner for the first draft. By deliberately using unusual phrasings of the common questions, I hope to encourage enough debate about what their replacement should be that I can actually learn enough to make a good job of writing these reviews. By making those unusual phrasings be emotionally neutral, I hope that if better replacements can not be found we still get left with something that we can use.

please feel free to keep chipping in, as I can use all the help I can get with this university project on www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A584525

oops that should have been http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A584525

Intelligence: the ability to understand and learn and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason

General semantics is not an area I have anything to do with (I am not even certain I know what it means) although semiotics is something I have looked at . It certainly is not science but it is a fairly rigorous area of academic research (in some quarters anyway). The same can be said for ontology.

The adoption of ontology by computer scientists working on AI and natural language and their failure to do much with it shows (to me) how difficult it can be to translate key philosphical ideas to quantitive methods. But it also illiustrates the need to do so and the value of non-scientific definitions of intelligence.

The upshot is I wouldn't have any problem seeing non-science (non-crank) terms being used in the general definition. In fact they may provide some motivation for the science.

Any general definition of intelligence would have to include Alexandria's the idea of logic based on premises and include some notion learning.

general semantics is about the meaning of meaning, and how the observer corrupts his observations, and how to minimise doing so, but for a better definition, pop over to my website (linked to from my page), and follow the links to the general semantics page from the site index. from there you can get to the institute of general semantics, which has been going for many years.

anyway, after the temporary blip when the project was not here, we are back up and running, and ready for more feedback.

ps learning doesn't seem to be required for intelligent behaviour, only for extending the set of circumstances in which you can apply it.

I read up on some of the general semantics stuff yesterday. It was a bit wierd for me although some of their points are well made.

If you say that learning is not required for intelligent behaviour, I will try and believe you but a lot of people are going to need a lot of convincing. For so long intelligence has meant knowledge that the belief in the link to learning is ingrained in many people (such as myself). That intelligence extends to the application of aristotelian logic is natural for most people. If that is not what you mean by intelligence, then that needs to be made clear and also why.

Given I have read at least one waring forum on the subject of intelligence (self-assessed as it was) and who is more intelligent than whom, the matter does seem to a burning topic of conversation for some.

PT

I am not denying that in most practial circumstances, learning is an integral part of intelligent behaviour, only that it doesn't have to be.
The only time that learning is required, is when you have a changing environment, and thus have to be highly adaptive. If your environment is relatively stable, then once you have got a sufficient amount of knowledge, learning is not required.
It is for this reason that we are struggling to adapt society from the "you learn everything you need at school" model of education to the "learning for life" model. This lifelong learning only became required after world war 2, when the pace of change increased to the point where what you learned at school was no longer enough.
note: I am not saying that older people are thick, only that they were inapropriately trained.

You have put forward a telling argument here and I am convinced. I would not have thought of it myself though (at least not without some prompting). Maybe you need to add a paragraph or so that goes something like these (I am trying to be constructive by proposing text - toss it out if you don't like it).

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Intelligence has historically been linked to knowledge. This old meaning survives in phrases like Military Intelligence. By a natural extension, people have taken learning and the ability to apply logical processes to knowledge as being fundamental to intelligence.

Recently thinkers have come to realise that learning and logic are responses to change not inherrent to intelligence. In static environments animals and humans can exhibit all the signs of intelligence but show no signs of learning or logical extension. People trained to work machinery, perform surgery, operate computers or in agriculture may appreciate the distinction. The work may be complex and detailed, but it does not require any kind of original thought. In heart surgury, the surgeon may need to be very intelligent and quick thinking but be limited to unoriginal techniques!

In cases where the behaviours are known from birth or taught early, there need be no less intelligence than in dynamic environments. In past generations, many cultures focused on "you learn everything you need during adolecence" where learning was done early in life and the skills were meant to last. These cultures now are struggling to adapt to a "learning for life" model where learning, adaption and knowledge extension become the norm of intelligent behaviours.

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Do with this as you will. I will admit it has taken all day to draft in between getting those things done I am meant to do.

PT