Thinking about what intelligence actually is, made me firstly think of what it is not: everything that we yell a heartily "stupid!" at. Apparently the boy in the school for the gifted that pushes on the door with the sign "pull" must be stupid. But why do we think so? Because we think that we know what he tries to do. Because when we see a school, a pupil and a door, we assume that the student wants to get inside. Failing that task, even though a sign is there to help him, makes us laugh at him.

But could you imagine a scenario, where the very same situation happens, but with a different context, and everyone who sees it would cry "smart!"? Actually there is not only one but an infinite number of them. What prevents us from seeing them are assumptions of our world. The first assumption is, that everything which is relevant for the situation, is shown in the picture. It's like a small ockhams razor. Further assumptions are, that the boy is a pupil, that the pupil wants to get inside the building, that he can read roman characters and understands the english language. All these assumptions make a lot of sense, because of the experience that the viewers of the picture have. We call this common sense, because these experiences are shared within our cultures, and make it easier to communicate and act within our society, by having similar sets of assumptions.

But back to intelligence. We judge the intelligence of the boy's behaviour based on our set of assumptions and our expectations of the goal that he most likely has. Maybe he just extinguishes a fire inside the building by shutting the door to prevent oxygen going in. So it is not easy at all to judge whether some behaviour is intelligent or not. Sounds a bit like a kafka-story. So what about introspection? Or intelligence tests?

Homer Simpsons sang once: "I am so smart, I am so smart, S M R T, I mean S M A R T." Doing this after burning his high school diploma, it seems laughable to consider this to be smart behaviour. But Homer is convinced that he is smart, and rightly, because he achieved what he wanted to achieve, and by that standard, his earlier behaviour can be considered as intelligent.

Intelligence tests are a bunch of questions and tasks, that have some more or less hidden pattern within the question, and the testee is supposed to discover the pattern by recognizing and expanding it to further items that fit into that pattern. Most even don't ask a question, they assume you know what to do with the presented patterns. So what intelligence tests actually do measure is, your familiarity with the presented patterned item groups, your curiosity for patterns within item groups and your ability to discover and expand them with new items. But what happens when you find different patterns than the test creators? Are you stupid if you say 1,2,4,8 should be followed by W? No, you aren't because the test doesn't measure intelligence at all. They aren't much more than tests of some kind of "pattern common sense" within our society.

This is not news, and many different approaches to intelligence measuring have been employed to get a better result. Emotional Intelligence, Technical Intelligence, Language Intelligence, I don't know how many things have been called Intelligence in this way in the last twenty years. But my point is, that we should go back to the development of the test. The creators tried to develop a tool to judge the subjects on whether they are intelligent or not. They did this by gathering a bunch of questions where common sense gives something like an obvious answer. The problem is, that common sense can change over time, and that other people can have different assumptions and goals than expected. So what is intelligence?

I think intelligence is a property of a being, because it needs to have a stupid alternative, which can only happen if a being either acts by choosing one option of many, or it thinks/processes one way of many.

I think intelligence is subjective to the being, because it can't be understood without understanding the goals of the actor. That is the reason why everyone considers himself to be intelligent, unless he starts comparing himself to others or listening to other people's judgements. (Like Sheriff Carter said in Eureka Episode 104: "I scored 111 on the I.Q. Test, that's more than 100%!" Only the weird looks of the others make him realize, that this was kind of stupid to say.)

I think intelligence is sensitive to the being's context, because every form of acting/thinking/processing is part of multiple contexts on mutiple scales and can be judged on multiple goals.

I think intelligence is a consensus of judgement by multiple beings, as it would be a worthless concept if everyone thinks he is intelligent and all different behaviour is stupid. This only works within groups, who already share common goals and a common sense.

I think intelligence is a concept of group-feedback for actions, as the feedback helps the individual actor to see which of his actions are considered stupid by others, and can try to change his behaviour.

picture by Tom Rydquist
Read the full article...

Hello Jeff,

I've read your book some time ago, and saw your speech on HTM today. In your speech you said something like "well, hierarchies are out there in the world, everyone knows that". I've learned to look twice, when someone takes something as given or trivial in a scientific speech. Why do we assume they are given? It is my opinion that we take structures like hierarchies or constant motion on the dimension of time as given (as "causes"), because they are a fundamental part of how our brains work. If we'd try to imagine a world without any structure at all, like a perfect randomness, then we fail. As soon as interactions betweens elements in the world come in, these interactions can be perceived as patterns, and the interactions are guaranteed by having someone who perceives the world in the first place. So even if we could have perfect randomness in an imaginary world, it would lose the randomness through observation instantly (I think something similar happens in quantum theory). In conclusion we should make the deductive step, that the structure of the world is not out there on its own, but it is our perception of the world, and fundamentally based in the structure of our brains.

In a second step I want to ask about what exactly these structures are, that we perceive (and thus must have in our brain). I searched many cognitive scientists' theories, but none ever listed some "complete set of cognitive functions", or when they try, they never give any reason why something is included and something else not. I call this problem a Gap between perceived "self-evident" structure of the world and the Cognitive Output of our brains. If there was a way to directly link the cognitive real world tasks that our brain performs all the time, with the structure of the world that we base everything on all the time, we could have better progress on understanding the system. I just came up with the thought, that with the first step I took in the first paragraph of my email, we could close the gap a bit, by moving the structural properties of the world back into our brain. In direct relation to this gap, I noticed in your speech that you always have to chose, whether to take the biological point of view or the computational/performational. If we can close this gap, we would have a theory that unifies these two views, and make actual progress on what intelligence is in itself.

My idea is, to create two seperate lists: one for the underlying principles of how the brain works, and a second for the cognitive tasks our brain manages to do. With these lists, we could go and try to make explanations, how the latter can be formed by the first, and I think this is actually what intelligence is about - not some photo-recognition of cats and dogs on the one hand vs. neural signal pattern recognition on the other with no perspective of bringing the two together except by trial and error in a computational scenario. It is rather yet another loop.

Thanks for reading so far, I would very much like to hear your opinion on these two points. Any yet another small question: have you thought about introducing social factors for learning environments in your model, like several actors who learn the same task at the same time, and communicate with each other? Or is communication in itself to complex a task yet?

Thank you so much.

Andreas

picture by Sarah Caufield

Read the full article...

Apparently this blog and my thinking is stuck on the topic of Abraham Maslows Hierarchy of needs. So I want to examine what is the root behind this hierarchy, and how it can be seen in a more abstract way. I took a close look on the hierarchy, and wondered: What kind of perspective does the creator of this hierarchy had.

It is striking that it is developed for human beings, but how does maslow see human beings? The physiological level sees the human as a lifeform. The safety level assures this lifeform is dedicated to existing, it sees the lifeform as striving. The level of belonging adds a societal quality to these striving lifeforms, while the level of self-esteem puts a counterweight to it, in form of a competitive society. The level of self-actualization makes this lifeform seeking for happiness.

So Abraham Maslows Humans are lifeforms that strive within a society full of competition for happiness. I think it is a good account for the beginning of the 20th century. But as we are in the 21st century already, a lot of criticism has emerged in the meantime. It show that this model has its limits, but within these limits it can be quite useful. After all it was just an essay and not scientific research, as Maslow told himself.

What I want to do now is, to abstract this concept, in order to make it available for other domains, like i did in my last post for describing the data-lifecycle.



The first level is existence, singularity. To have a concept of something, it is necessary that it is distinguishable from it's surroundings. It is the introduction of a distinction between "one" and "other", which is the second level: duality. Duality allows interaction between the one and the rest. This interaction leeds to the interpretation of "other" as "other ones". It is the third level, which I call: plurality. As soon as you have several "ones", they can never be identical. Every entity has to differ from the others in at least one quality, otherwise it would not be a different entity. These differences lead to a dimension for these entities, so I shall name it the level of dimensionality. This new dimension has broken all limitations that a single entity suffered in the first place, so there is not much left to do - except for the one thing: to take a step back, have a look at the dimension and perceive it as a new entity. This last level I name: unity. This wraps it up :)


Now you can go out, take these Five sides of essence that are: singulariy, duality, plurality, dimensionality and unity and apply this abstract concept to any concept. I don't care if it is number theory, anthropology, astronomy, education, diets, political theory, theology, or what else you have in mind. Throw your concepts at me, and I will try and write a blog entry about how your concept can be perceived in terms of these five steps. If any abstract concept has developed in a language so far, that you a term for it has evolved, then my theory should be able to analyse it. Maybe it will be an eye-opener on some aspects that have been forgotten before.

Read the full article...

Today I thought once more about my computer(s). They play a very important role, because you can do almost everything with them, yet you don't really need them, because for 99% of what you do, you also have a classic variant of doing it, without need of a computer. But what is it, that the computer means to me, and what do I mean to the computer?

I'm the administrator of my computer. I look that it gets energy, that it is cleaned and cooled, and when things break down or are outdated I replace them. I tidy the data, I unclog the harddisk and I check for errors.

In return I use the computer for getting what I want. It is my TV, my Music centre, my Radio, my Mailbox, my Newspaper, my Telephone, my Toy, my Bank, my Store, my School, my University, my Workplace and my Book club. I could do all of this without a computer, but it helps my to save time and energy and money to get what I want.

But on a second look I also use it as a tool, for creating, processing, archiving and distributing data, like text, sound, pictures, videos, posters, flyers, invitations, and so on. Let me try and cast the concept of "data" onto the hierarchy of needs by Abraham Maslow. You may think this is odd, because data can't _do_ anything, but by the interaction of data and humans, you can give every level of need an extra-loop, which includes the humans who handle the data. This is why I enclosed the data-need levels in a term that is a process on data by humans.



The first level is the physiological level, which are necessary for anything to exist. Virtual data doesn't need much to exist. Some storage device, some energy, some output device, that's it. I call it "sustaining data".

The second level is security, which means, you don't want your data to be destroyed. For that you have some backup devices or online repositories. I call this level "archiving data".

On a third level, which is love and belonging for human needs, the data would also want some interaction. All data cries for being used, which happens by distributing data" to other consumers.

The fourth level would be esteem. Data wants to be important. Everyone can create heaps of useless junk, that noone will ever care about. Data with high esteem is processed, it is used by the consumers, it is refined and combined, and stripped of the unnecessary. I call it "processing data".

The fifth level is the level of self-actualization. In order for data to fulfill it's purpose, it needs to play a role even after a long time. In our world most data is fastly outdated, that's why it is important to inspire the consumers to create new data. I termed it "creating data", because data can't reproduce itself, like humans do.

And what do you do with new data? Right, you start right from the beginning in Level 1. So what appears to be a hierarchy for the individual data, like maslow designed the hierarchy for an individual human being, in fact it is a circle from a different perspective. Data will come and go, and humans will come and go, but the circle of needs will keep being there, in order to not destroy communication, or humanity.

Thanks for reading

P.S.: Looking at the picture my first thought was, strange, in our world it goes the other way round, but thinking about I guess that's the main difference between data and humans. Data exists for humans not for themselves, so archiving and sustaining are quite low, while creativity is the most important part. Most humans though are still too much of an animal to put creativity over food :)

Read the full article...

Change is a basic need for the human brain. It needs changes in its surroundings, to be able to learn. And it needs to learn, in order to adapt to new situations. And adaptation is necessary to survive. Security is good, but boring, and boredom can be only broken by change. Change is possible every year, every day, every minute - in all dimensions. Think of all the moments that changed human history, in less than a second! How vast was the expansion of the universe after the first second of its existence! Remember your personal most important seconds in your life! One word, one look, one gesture, one button, it can change the whole development of your surroundings for the rest of your life. But it can always change yourself, too.

Look at yourself and ask: What am I? Is this what I am supposed to be? Why can't I be what I always wanted to be? The problem is not, that something is blocking you from becoming what you want to be - the real problem is, that you see blockades and problems where non exist. Everything in the way is an opportunity to learn, to grow, and to solve the problem. Change doesn't happen because you wish for it, it comes when you work for it. There is no such thing as talent or gift. When you develop a positive, open-minded, problem-solving, patient attitude toward your world, the world will give whatever you want.

Change doesn't mean to confront the past. It means to forget about the past, to take the lessons that had to be learned, and look into the future. It means not to just fix errors of the past, it means to have the right focus on the right things, and to make the right decisions at the right time.

Make change a part of your life! Change yourself everyday a bit! Awaken the Giant in you, and the Warrior, and the Wise, and the Lover, and the King! You know you are all of it, but most of the time you live in denial. Don't be afraid! Change yourself, and you will change your world.

Read the full article...