Are We Even Intelligent Enough To Understand What Intelligence Is?
This is so unlike me, you say? Well, this might be the first time you are absolutely right about stuffs that concern me. How about you ask me this beautiful mad question: "Are you even intelligent enough to talk about intelligence?"
Are We Intelligent Enough To Understand What Intelligence Is? Let Us See.
Intelligence is one hell mysterious thing if you think about it. I want you to think about Intelligence in a much deeper level than most people do. We are not going to talk about your standard perspective towards Intelligence here. We are going to talk about a deep and very advanced stuff here.
Think about it. You as an individual have intelligence. Whatever the level is does not matter. Whether in a low level or high level, the thing is you have it. So what it is? The question I am going to throw in here is I am not interested in what is human intelligence, I am not interested in how to quantify intelligence, I am interested in what is intelligence at existential level. Because if you look inside yourself, you will notice that you have gotten it. And you can notice when you are using it. And you can feel it functioning within you. But then, what is that?
I mean obviously it is there and it seems to be at function in the feature of the universe because you are a piece of the universe. So whatever you have or possess, the universe have it by extension. What I want you to notice as we go into how intelligence work, is that intelligence is actually contrary to what many of us believe it to be. Many rational beliefs see intelligence as some sort of mechanical process of using logic. But that is not what intelligence is at all. It is much more a tangible abstract mysterious sort of thing.
How is it possible that you can behave intelligently? How is it possible that you have this intelligent thought? That is not a dumb mechanical process. That is not some computer crunching away some numbers. You can look at some situation of life with intelligence. What does that really mean? What is it really made out of?
It all depends on just what it is as Science gives us lots of definitions that I can sight to you here. There are many Scientist from AI Research to Neural Science to Social Psychologist to Clinical Psychologist and Developmental Psychologist that have been studying this stuff for the last hundred years and all of their definitions (you can go and read up on Wikipedia) are really unsatisfying.
They should have think that we cannot just break down intelligence as just some sort of behavior. In fact, one of the definitions I came across on Wikipedia defines intelligence as a capacity of a system to basically navigate some sort of puzzle or complex maze
. That is what it was reduced down to. But there is something deeper going on than just that. But before we get into that, I want to bring your attention to an interesting story.
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How I Got This Crazy Idea?
One day I decided to go to a place where all these conspiracy theories are sort off. I am not a type that visit such a place regularly and I have actually been there only a couple of times in my whole life but I decided to go there to see what kind of crazy nonsense that people are talking about.
So I got and started looking around just for curiosity but I saw this short form there called Science and Mathematics. I was like wow there might be some interesting thing about Science being talked about here. One of the things that blow my mind was that they were all talking about intelligence. Almost every post there are all about intelligence one form or another. Because those are there are all these high school kids, early college kids and some university kidsas well mostly males and they are interested in becoming good Scientists and Mathematicians.
So they seem to have this idea that to become a great Mathematician, you need to have a very high IQ. So everybody was talking about IQs, is your IQ high enough to become a great Scientist and they put graphs and study things like that with all these kind of evidence and data to suggest that if your IQ is below 150, you should not border going into Technical Science fields or hard Science fields like Physical Science, Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering (these STEM fields) because you will not be able to become a great Scientist or Engineer and basically you are not going to succeed in life because your IQ is too low.
So people were asking questions like: _"Hey! Is my IQ high enough to become a great physician, a mathematician, a computer programmer and stuffs like that?" _Just as you are expecting, many of the answers were NO! This to me was sad and amusing at the same time because all these supposedly intelligent people with IQ higher than 150 (that were posting responses) have such a narrow minded perspective on what intelligence really is. They really believe that their ability to succeed in life lies on their IQ and they believe that whether they are going to make breakthrough with Science is all about their ability to pass some silly IQ test. That is really shortsighted and very limiting.
The saddest part of this is that they really do not understand where the creative achievements of the greatest scientists come from. They do not come from being able to solve standard IQ test. They come through innovation, through creativity, being able to think outside the box. Being able to jump between different paranoids, some sort of flexibility. That is really what you need if you want to be a breakthrough scientist. This is something other than IQ. People get stuck on this notion of IQ as if IQ is some sort of features of the universe. No! IQ is a very limited narrow quantification of this larger thing called intelligence.
By the way, there are many different ways to measure intelligence. An IQ is very much a culturally biased, sort of westernized, rational version of how to measure intelligence. It is precisely because intelligence is so abstracting, mysterious and difficult to pin down that there is no good way to measure it. But of course, Science is all about quantifying something. So if you cannot quantify something, it is not real. But with Science is a problem, because scientists are using intelligence to do the Science, but at the same time, the scientists do not have a clue what intelligence really is.
Of course, that is embarrassing. So what you want to do is we want create a some test and use some stupid formula to reduce down what intelligence is. They are saying we can use that to judge other people's intelligence. That is a bad perspective. Intelligence does not stop at being able to pass IQ test.
You can actually measure intelligence in several ways. Your ability to solve logical puzzles, your body structure itself (like you fight better than most people, boxing, wrestling, etc) that is static intelligence, or you are a type that is good in mechanical works, and of course we have emotional intelligence - EQ. I am always scratching surfaces to understand how many types of intelligence we have out there but you can see that intelligence is so broad, broader than all of those we have taken into account. They are not enough.
You can wonder how come intelligence takes all of those forms. You have to be intelligent to be able to solve hard puzzles. Not just that, composing great songs and melodies requires being intelligent as well. You have to be intelligent to be able to be good at politics and being a good leader in general. So what is the common thread there? Because we call all of these intelligence but they are of different kinds. Is there commonality?
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Intelligence Is Way Beyond Being About Just IQ
Interesting enough, you know people do not study what intelligence is. You know what they measure is the rate of your success in life and even in business. Well, that is not IQ. It is EQ. Your emotional intelligence is far more important. Not just that. Also when we are talking about your happiness and wellbeing in life, IQ is not what you should be worried about. You should be worried about EQ and other topics like consciousness awareness and stuffs like that.
Even if you are type that is like ”oh I do not care about my happiness, I do not care about intelligence, I do not care about relating with people, I am just one of those serious Scientists and all I care about is just being good at my Math or my Science.. That is all I care about and all I need is my IQ”, you are still narrowing it down. And ultimately you are not going to have a good successful life even if you do manage to become a great Mathematician or something. Because you know what, it is still very narrow.
I know of some professional mathematicians in Universities who are deeply intelligent as far as mathematics goes, but they are clueless about the larger picture about how Mathematics fit into the larger reality. Being a great scientist means not just being good in your narrowed technological field but it means having a big picture curiosity and picture about the world. This is why the genius scientists broaden their knowledge and intelligence.
People like David Bohm, Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. These are not typical technological scientists. These are true geniuses and if you want to be a genius, you need to understand and be able to tap in to wider range of intelligence at extensional level. Not just some stupid human beliefs or sayings that society and culture has created. And today, you can become such an incredible scientist or mathematician or engineer if you actually get into the root bottom of what intelligence is and tap into true intelligence.
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What Intelligence Is Not
Well, enough of that part. Let us talk about what intelligence is not.
• Obviously, intelligence is not IQ.
• Intelligence is not logical reasoning.
• Also, intelligence is not knowledge, of course.
• Intelligence is not imaginary phenomenal.
• Intelligence is not a feature of the brain.
• Intelligence is not human quality.
• Intelligence is not even biological or something that is exclusive to life.
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So Then, What Is Intelligence?
Well, to really answer this, I want to talk about how I discovered for myself the essence of intelligence. What I want to talk about here is not something everyone is going to understand. This is something that maybe one in a million people can understand. It does not matter how high your IQ is because what we are going to be talking about here may sound crazy. So I encourage you to follow me with an open mind.
Even if you study enlightenment or you read books about enlightenment, chances are you have not heard anybody talking about what intelligence really is. I have read dozens of books and come across dozens of videos and I have not heard anybody talking about true intelligence.
Well, here I will tell you what I know. This is that human intelligence is just a tip of the iceberg, of cosmic, of universal intelligence. The entire universe is intelligence. This intelligence is a pure intelligence. This means it is formless, it is infinite, it is present in every square milimeter of the entire universe. This intelligence is disembodied. That is what intelligence really is. It is not some neuron-engineered brain. It is not some behaviors stuff you can do, some puzzle you can solve. It is just pure intelligence. And the reason it is so challenging is because it is so abstract that you do not know how to get handle of it.
Notice that right now you are intelligent. I want you to go inside of yourself. Do this exercise, go inside yourself and feel yourself. your intelligence is that faculty within you that is allowing you to understand. Think about what that really is. How is it possible that you can actually understand this concept that i am talking about. How is it possible that you actually look at reality and make sense of it?
This is not a simple thing. This is extraordinary. This is some mysterious stuff. We just take it for granted and say "hey, we were born with it and everybody us can kind of do it". But think about it, this is an unbelievable gift. Think of it as some sought of miracle. How is it possible that some random balls bouncing around inside our box can lead to having a deep understanding of some fascinating reality? Consider that intelligence is fundamental to reality and it is not an emerging property that comes after billions of years later after much evolution.
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Departing thoughts
If you lookclosely within yourself, you will understand that that intelligence is not yours. You are not doing intelligence. Intelligence is doing you. If you are an intelligent person, you have a high IQ, you love to take credit for your intelligence. As if you are doing it. As if you are that genius that can solve that puzzle. But no, it is a gift that you have been given. And of course, you can also lose some of it. It is not static. You can definitely be much more intelligent than you used to be.
And one of those ways to be hyper-intelligent is to be able to tap into infinite intelligence. Because if you think that intelligence is just a thing that is inside the human brain, a little tip of the iceberg is all you have. Most scientists use only that little tip. If you are able to tap into Infinite intelligence, you will realise that it is a much larger thing and the n you are able to tap into it and you are able to pull creative ideas and become so brilliant that you could never dare take credit for what you can do with your intelligence yourself.
References
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- Are We Really Humans Or Just A Bunch Of Bacteria? Too Many Misconceptions Here
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Thank you too for rearing this hell of a read. Glad to see you here.
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Thank you for taking your time to read this. Honored.
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