Understanding is the Essence of Intelligence

If I understand well Robert Burton, in his book "ON BEING CERTAIN: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not", there are two kinds of knowledge:
- Scientific knowledge that can be verified and that we deeply understand ourselves
- Opinions or beliefs that are so strong that it feels just like knowledge

It does not mean that the later is wrong, it means that it is not knowledge although it feels like knowledge.

It is very difficult to make the difference between these two kinds of knowledge because the result is a feeling of knowing.

So if understanding is the essence of intelligence, then some understanding could also be a feeling of understanding and intelligence is the ability to accept, and function with, uncertain understandings. Understanding that we may not know what we think we know would then be an elevated state of intelligence.

No wonder there is so much suffering on this planet when we so strongly think we know things that are in fact wrong. Decisions are made everyday based on beliefs of the past including decisions to go to fight what we know (or believe) is evil.

Hopefully people such as Robert will undermine these strong opinions but unfortunately Robert is not running for President.

Who do you want for President, someone who is convinced he knows or someone who can question what he thinks he knows when facing important decisions?

Thanks to Jean-Hugues for the link.

Tags: Knowledge, Beliefs, Certainty, Intelligence.

Since my teenage I have been fascinated with intelligence and the prospect that we may one day achieve true computational intelligence. As I was doing research on intelligence I was always more interested in the essence of intelligence rather than trying to reproduce life behaviors as many others in the AI (Artificial Intelligence) community. After many years of unsuccessful results I came to the conclusion that understanding was the essence of that intelligence.

Today, I was reacting to Jean-Hugues post about intelligences with an 's' who himself was reacting to "Speaking of Stupidity…..Technology Makes Us Dumb! But Also Smart?", which in turn was referring to a a review from the book of Mark Bauerlein with the catchy title “The Dumbest Generation”. Follow these links at your own risk :-)

So, here are my thoughts to the long chain of events that lead us here today.

If, as I claim, understanding is the essence of intelligence, it does not matter what we understand.

Technology, science and prior knowledge do not make us smarter or dumber, it just enables us to use our adaptive intelligence in new ways to understand new concepts.

We may then appear smarter to the previous generation, or dumber for those of the previous generation who can't understand (those of us with less of the essence of intelligence) that we are well adapted to our generation, as, I hope not, the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University the author of  “The Dumbest Generation”.

The reverse is also true, and a generation may have difficulties understanding the previous generation.

It's also true between different cultures throughout the world, making it very difficult to transpose an understood system in a different area of the world where exists different understanding schemes, and hence the failures of shoe-horned democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan by people who fail to understand the middle east background cultures for people who fail to understand the benefits of democracy and freedom in general.

The only thing that really matters is our ability to build new understanding schemes in our brains. We can only learn what we truly understand. Any other form of learning has a shorter retention span and computers are much better than us at memorizing (call it learning) things that they don't understand.

The faster we understand the better because we use previous understanding schemes to build new ones. Also, in life (real or virtual), the faster we understand a situation, the faster we can adapt to it, learn from it, respond appropriately to it, and profit from it.

Ideally all our brain regions would have the same ability to build new schemes, but this would be without counting on pleasure. Pleasure is the result of any positive feedback from our environment and our internal chemistry. This includes the feedback the new generation gets from facebook or after editing wikipedia articles.

Early in life, and until our death, pleasures guide us to make to new connections in the arrays of our brains where we receive the largest positive feedback.

Over time, after favoring much of the same areas we develop a sort of expertise in some domains and we may then appear to have what other will perceive as a gift or gifts or intelligences with an 's' :-)

I understand, therefore I am.

See Also:
The Essence of Intelligence is in the Ability to Understand Others
Do we really know what we think we Know for sure?
Where do people find the time to contribute to Wikipedia and Open-Source?

Tags: Understanding, Intelligence.