Intelligence (continued)

Originally published on DickeySingh.com

In an earlier blog, I defined Intelligence as:

Human Intelligence is how we retain what we comprehend and perceive as knowledge, and how we intuitively adapt and apply this knowledge to the various day-to-day tasks in the full context of the environment.

Marvin Minsky described Intelligence as a “suitcase” term, a suitcase that you can stuff words like sentience, awareness, self-awareness, intuitiveness, perception, alertness, interpretation, coherence, ability, insight, decisiveness, acumen, comprehension, judgment, discernment, realization, consciousness, sense, emotionality, reasoning, responsibility, conscientiousness, and more.

Human Intelligence enables humans to think, reason, decide, retain, experience, use symbols to build complex descriptions, recognize patterns, and most importantly merge concepts to form new concepts.

Conscientiousness itself is another suitcase term. You can stuff other words in it. So are words like self-awareness, creativity, and emotion.

To remove ambiguity and to differentiate we tend to use a qualifying prefix for such suitcase terms. Consider the following sets of examples:

• Human Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, and Reconnaissance Intelligence
• Spacial Awareness, Self Awareness, Emotional Awareness, and Covert Awareness.
• Computational Creativity, and Malevolent Creativity, i.e. creativity for calculated harm.

Categorizing Human Intelligence

There are many theories that categorize Human Intelligence. The three popular ones are by psychologists Raymond Cattell, Robert Sternberg, and Howard Gardner who categorized Human Intelligence based on tasks, cognition and modality respectively.

Task-based categorization

Psychologist Raymond Cattell identified two task-based distinct forms of Human Intelligence, Fluid and Crystalline Intelligence.

Fluid Human Intelligence (Gf)

Fluid Human Intelligence is the ability to reason and solve novel problems, independent of any knowledge from the past, and identify patterns. It includes inductive and deductive reasoning. You use fluid intelligence to find your way from the airport gate to the car rental kiosk, figuring things out on the go and adapting to your environment.

Crystallized Human Intelligence (Gc)

Crystallized Human Intelligence is the ability to use accumulated skills, learned knowledge and experience. It relies on accessing information from long-term memory. Once you have traveled multiple times, you recall how you navigated from the gate to the kiosk using long-term memory.

Cognition-based categorization

Robert Sternberg provided a cognition-based description of intellectual capability “Theory of Sucessful Human Intelligence.” He associated the workings of the mind with three components.

• Meta-components tell the mind how to act, i.e. to solve problems and make decisions.
• Performance components do tasks assigned by meta-components, and
• Knowledge-acquisition components, are used in obtaining and selectively combining new information.

Sternberg’s Theory of Successful Human Intelligence describes three fundamental aspects of Human Intelligence:

Analytical Human Intelligence

Analytical Human Intelligence is the ability to analyze and evaluate ideas, solve problems and make decisions.

Creative Human Intelligence

Creative Human Intelligence involves using creativity to 1) solve a problem when experiencing a novel situation for the first time, or 2) automate a task which has been performed multiple times.

Contextual Human Intelligence

Contextual Human Intelligence is the ability that individuals use to find the best fit between themselves and the environment, either by 1) adapting themselves to the environment, 2) selecting an appropriate environment, or 3) shaping the environment to better suit their needs.

Modality-based categorization

Howard Gardner has described numerous and distinctive types of intelligence in his books and videos. He describes the following forms of Human Intelligence based on modality: Linguistic, Logical-Mathematical, Musical, Bodily-kinesthetic, Personal, Naturalist, Spatial, Moral or Ethical, Pedagogical and Existential.

Linguistic Human Intelligence

People high in linguistic Human Intelligence have an affinity spoken and written words. It’s a kind of skill that poets, writers, journalists, orators have.

Logical-Mathematical Human Intelligence

Logicians, mathematicians, scientists have that kind of Human Intelligence. People with this intelligence are good at mathematical proofs, scientific reasoning, and experimentation.

Musical Human Intelligence

People with Musical Human Intelligence have the capacity to appreciate, produce music by voice or by an instrument, or to conduct music.

Bodily-kinesthetic Human Intelligence

People with Bodily-kinesthetic Human Intelligence have the ability to use the whole body (e.g. athletes and dancers) or part of the body (e.g. hands in the case of a craftsperson) to solve problems or to make things.

Personal Human Intelligence

Personal Human Intelligence is inward looking (Intrapersonal) and outward looking (Interpersonal).

• Intrapersonal Intelligence is the understanding oneself and an ability to distinguish between feelings. People with Intrapersonal Intelligence can symbolize and represent complicated and highly differentiated sets of feelings. They have high emotional and social intelligence and contribute positively to smart groups.
• People who exhibit Interpersonal Intelligence are better at understanding, motivating, leading, cooperating and working with others. Strong interpersonal intelligence would be an asset to those who are teachers, leaders, politicians, clinicians, religious leaders, etc.

Personal Human Intelligence is closely related to Emotional Human Intelligence (EI) and is the ability to handle intrapersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.

Naturalist Human Intelligence

People with Naturalist Human Intelligence, have the ability to differentiate between individual plants, insects, and animals. A botanist, zoologist or biologist exhibits this intelligence. We also exhibit this intelligence when we select one a jacket over another or go for a hike in the woods.

Spatial Human Intelligence

Spatial Human Intelligence allows people to work in space that’s close by. A chess player, a surgeon, an airplane pilot, a crane operator exhibit spatial intelligence. This is how we find our way around a large territory or space.

Existential Human Intelligence

Existential intelligence is the intelligence of philosophical questions like that of existence, knowledge, or reality; and artistic or esthetics questions. For instance, What does it mean to love? Why do we die? What’s going to be in the future? Only humans exhibit existential intelligence. Gardner made a case against Spiritual Intelligence and proposed Existential Intelligence instead.

Pedagogical Human Intelligence

Some people have better teaching skills or abilities than others. Teaching Intelligence allows us to be able to teach other people successfully. People who can adapt teaching (method and content) to the audience have higher Pedagogical Intelligence. Source: Howard Gardner

Moral Human Intelligence

Moral or Ethics Intelligence involves establishing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct. Ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality using notions such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime.

Human Emotional Intelligence (EI)

Human Emotional Intelligence (EI) is the capacity of individuals to identify and manage emotions both their own and those of others. EI includes the ability to,

• be mindful of their own emotions and those of others, i.e. emotional awareness or emotional sensitivity
• harness emotions and apply them to cognitive tasks like thinking and problem solving, and
• manage emotions, by adjusting, adapting or regulating their own emotions and those of others, e.g. by cheering up or calming down.

EI is closely related to Gardner Personal Human Intelligence.

Emotional Quotient (EQ)

Emotional Quotient is how the development of Emotional Intelligence (EI) can be measured.

Social Intelligence (SI)

Social Intelligence is used to describe social perceptiveness. Presence of Social Intelligence in a group makes the group collectively intelligent. Women have much higher social perceptiveness or Social Intelligence then men.

Non-Human Intelligence

Plant Intelligence

Plants exhibit intelligence in numerous ways. Mimosa collapses its leaves temporarily when it is disturbed by dropping. However, upon continuous dropping, the plant learns to ignore the stimuli but continues to react to other disruptions. Plants secrete defensive chemicals when they hear an audio recording of caterpillars munching on leaves. See New Yorker article.

Animal Intelligence

Like Humans, dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror. Monkeys can use tools like a stone to crack open nuts. Birds, chimps, whales, bears, and octopi can plan for the future. Source: 1 and 2. Some animals also have enhanced perception compared to humans. For example, dogs, mice, and rats have advanced sense of smell. Dogs can hear high frequencies of upto 64,000 Hertz compared to under 20,000 Hertz for humans.

Animals have perception and rats have demonstrated sequencing. Only humans have the unique capability of merging different concepts to form new concepts, allowing us to build complex, highly nested symbolic descriptions of situations and events enabling story telling and generation.

Machine Intelligence

Machine Intelligence or Artificial Intelligence is machines exhibiting intelligent behavior generally displayed by humans, animals or plants. Such intelligence is collectively called Natural Intelligence, which includes Human Intelligence, Plant Intelligence and Animal Intelligence.

Collective Intelligence

When machines and humans working together collectively to achieve more than what humans or machines would accomplish working alone. Collective Intelligence is notibly higher in smart groups, or groups of people with higher social perceptiveness or social intelligence, where everyone participates equally in group conversations. Women bring higher social perceptiveness to groups. Diverse groups also have higher social perceptiveness.

Swarm Intelligence

Artificial Swarm Intelligence or Swarm Intelligence, is a type of local collaborative intelligence between robots, agents or boids, interacting locally with one another and with their environment. Swarm robots exhibit

• awareness — robots are aware of other robots in local area and environment
• self-awareness — robots are aware of their own skills
• autonomy — robots proactively coordinate and navigate
• solidarity — robots offer their skills and work in unison
• expandibility — robots are self-organizing when robots are added, and
• resiliency — robots are self-healing i.e. when robots are removed from local environment, they re-organize.

Collaborative Intelligence

Collective Intelligence is similar to Collaborative Intelligence in which agents, humans or machines, have the ability to independently to contribute to a problem-solving network.

We tend to use the term Intelligence quite widely. Terms like Business Intelligence, Sales and Marketing Intelligence, Competitive Intelligence, Growth Intelligence, Reconnaissance or Military Intelligence, Political Intelligence etc. are quite common.

We use Artificial Intelligence (AI), Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) and Artificial Artificial Intelligence (AAI).

We use Behavioral Intelligence to profit from behavioral segmentation by utilizing user behavior to influence actions to achieve desired outcomes.

Ambient Intelligence refers to senor-rich environments that respond to the presence of human beings.