What is an intelligence?
I’m taking a short break from writing about teaching, because I could go on … but I want to try tapping into a different vein of thinking, which undergirds and drives what I think about teaching and how I teach. This vein is fed with thunks that arise from a set of recurring questions in my head.
One of them is: “What is an intelligence?” Not “what is intelligence”, which implies intelligence as a feature of an entity, but an intelligence, an entity in its own right.
The etymology of intelligence
Most familiar words carry a lot of baggage from things I’ve read, and to try to shake those off and return to a word’s origin I like to dig into its etymology. Here is the entry for intelligence by the Online Etymology Dictionary:
late 14c., “the highest faculty of the mind, capacity for comprehending general truths;” c. 1400, “faculty of understanding, comprehension,” from Old French intelligence (12c.) and directly from Latin intelligentia, intellegentia “understanding, knowledge, power of discerning; art, skill, taste,” from intelligentem (nominative intelligens) “discerning, appreciative,” present participle of intelligere “to understand, comprehend, come to know.” This is from assimilated form of inter “between” (see inter-) + legere “choose, pick out, read,” from PIE root *leg- (1) “to collect, gather,” with derivatives meaning “to speak (to ‘pick out words’).”
To pick out words! Working from this basis, I might conceive of an intelligence as something that “picks out words”; not all entities use words, but I imagine they would choose from a set of options, building up some kind of response through this mechanism.
Intelligence as taste
It’s interesting that the sense of discernment and taste predates the sense of understanding and comprehension. To strip the connotative baggage from “taste”, I think of an intelligence as exhibiting some kind of preference. Perhaps over time, a consistently demonstrated preference reveals something of the inner world of this intelligence?
I’m trying to avoid the “understanding/comprehension” noun-cluster because it feels like a kind of mind-trap, a way to be tricked into thinking there’s something there. My gut sense and experience from teaching tells me that this is really difficult to define and test for: how do you know if someone/something really understands a concept or idea? Only if they are able to paraphrase it? If they can consistently produce the correct sequence of words defining it? I don’t want to enter that mind-trap.
Probing intelligences
With this tentative approach to questioning intelligence, I go around querying of various things: instead of asking “is this intelligent”, it seems more interesting to ask “is this an intelligence?” It appears I am not the first to do this. Bruce Sterling, in his Turing Centenary Speech, offers the questions “Is Siri an intelligence? Is Wikipedia an intelligence?”1
I think: If we consider Siri an intelligence, in what ways does she demonstrate discernment and taste? If we consider Wikipedia an intelligence, in what ways does she(?) demonstrate discernment and taste?
If we extend this to other intelligences, in what ways do they exhibit discernment and taste? To what extent? How complex is this taste?
Understanding intelligences
I don’t claim to know how discernment or taste work, but nonetheless we need a usefully applicable way to consider how we identify discernment & taste. I use a simple definition:
The intelligence receives some kind of input …
and performs some kind of output in response …
demonstrating some kind of choice or selection
Plants respond to sunlight and water by growing towards it, large language models respond to a sequence of input word tokens by extending it with more word tokens, computers respond to device input (from a keyboard, mouse, or other human-computer interface) by changing the display, playing a sound, vibrating, or any other means.
We could extend this idea to e.g. pinball machines, which fulfill the first two criteria but fail to demonstrate discernment and taste on their own without a player. This distinction is of course arbitrary, and is where I choose to draw the distinction between interesting and uninteresting intelligences; it’s how I demonstrate my own discernment and taste.
Intelligence in the classroom
The distinction is also subjective, because I don’t consider intelligence an objective phenomena; I have no intention of describing and demonstrating a real-world phenomenon, simply to map out something about the way I think about intelligence.
In my classroom, this helps me move away from thinking about the intelligence scale as “who knows more” or “who is able to do more”, closer to “who demonstrates discernment and taste”. It completely changes the way I design class exercises or ask questions. Instead of assessing knowledge or ability to process lots of information, my class exercises can now be oriented around how to provide opportunities for students to demonstrate discernment and taste, share it, explain it, refine it, and iterate on it.
His actual question, in context, is more like “What kind of a woman would Siri/Wikipedia be, if we thought of them were women?” I might be misreading but I like that perspective.