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Intelligence can be thought of as the ability to recognize useful or revolutionary paths (or shortcuts) in traversing developmental structures. This involves intuition, pattern recognition, and metacognitive skills. There are many orders of this ability. Throughout our lives, barring lucky accident, many of us remain largely at an order of development and activity that resists interpretation as intelligence at all.
Although we ascended the first rung, and acquire representational capacities and nominal membership in fictional cultures, very few achieve the necessary metacognitive perspectives that allow them to escape the relatively dangerous cradle this first developmental rung comprises.
The scientific method potentially comprises a powerful asset in this domain, but does not generate intelligence. It generates models of relationships. Intelligence lies in the insightful interpretation, linkage and both the application and refusal to apply the resulting principles. This obviously involves relationships. But since we are alive, relationships are not actually abstract in the senses we too easily imagine.
“It is as bizarre as it is absurd that if you image-search the term ‘Intelligence’ on Google — the result is…
