September 27, 2024, by Brigitte Nerlich
Intelligence
Since the recent explosion of discussions around artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, even super-intelligence, people have started to wonder what intelligence actually is… A rather futile enterprise in my humble opinion, as ‘intelligence’ is a word like ‘love’ or ‘justice’ that has endless meanings, but there we are.
Some scholars come at it from an etymological perspective (I like that), some from a psychological, cognitive science, neurological perspective (I like that podcast), some from a philosophical perspective and many many other perspectives.
As I have recently felt rather shattered and intellectually challenged, I listened to podcasts and read some blogs about ‘intelligence’; but I also read what one might call gossip columns. And strangely, just after having listened to the podcast on ‘what is intelligence?’, I read, in a rather desultory way, two interviews, one with the sculptor Julian Opie and one with the comedian and writer David Mitchell.
In both cases they talked, rather incidentally, about intelligence. Julian Opie said, in a throw-away remark: “I’m not naturally intelligent, but I sometimes am by chance”. That rang a bell with me. I have some relatives and friends who are naturally intelligent, or seem to be to me, whereas I feel I am not, but sometimes I get lucky and things fall into place. David Mitchell, in turn, said about his wife Victoria Coren Mitchell (generally regarded as very smart): “she thinks intelligence should primarily be used for jokes. And I completely agree with that”. And I completely agree with that too, and I would add ‘used for metaphors’.
That made me think.
Defining intelligence is difficult, but you recognise it when you see it. When a joke sparks laughter, when a baby plays/experiments for the first time with a xylophone (listen to Alison Gopnik in the podcast mentioned above), when my son as a toddler picked up some leaves at the bus stop, put them between his gloves and offered me a sandwich, and so on. One thing one can say, based on these anecdotes, is that artificial intelligence can’t really aspire to these feats of intelligence…. yet….
What I’d really love to do though, would be to continue where the linguist Jost Trier left off and chart the semantic field of ‘intelligent/intelligence’ (mind, knowledge, cognition, reasoning, comprehension etc.) in actual (English) language use. (Trier wrote his PhD in 1931 entitled Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes – the German vocabulary in the realm of the mind). But that would be a vast undertaking. A bit of AI might help….
Image: Van Gogh: Starry Night
No comments yet, fill out a comment to be the first
Leave a Reply