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Mental Machinery and Intelligence

By Michael McCurley

Through some reverse engineering of just a few simple concepts and paradigms for Artificial

Intelligence, we can begin to see how applying the term intelligence to human beings can become

complicated. Is individual intelligence a measure? Is it social intelligence? What if it is both?

What is intelligence? Intelligence may be the mental activity of a single individual, but the

mental interaction of larger groups of people also produces intelligence. As a conglomeration, the

group as a whole may be considered more intelligent than any of its individual representatives. This

is why people specialize and depend upon the rest of the group for other important cognitive

processes. Collective goals such as putting a man on the moon or building a complex state-of-the-

art aircraft, or a nuclear weapon are collective efforts, not individual ones, and so they use a

collective form of intelligence. Since individuals learn from collective intelligence as well, the dual-

feedback process is regenerative.

Lets start with a single statement to keep an overall perspective of intelligence in mind.

Human intelligence is individual, situational, interactional, structural, and synergetic.

Simple expansion of these five variables gives us the following:

1. Each person is individually intelligent.

2. Each person is situationally intelligent.

3. People areinteractionally intelligent.

4. A society of people isstructurally intelligent.

5. A society is synergetically intelligent.

This still might not tell us enough, so we must expand it a little further, though we run the

risk of entering the domains of subject specific areas of psychology, physiology, and sociology,

each with their own codes and languages. For now, anyway, its best to keep the explanation as

simple as possible. It also means that I will eliminate, for the time being, all historical references to

people who have made major contributions that would increase this text to ten times its present size,

and speak only of those people collectively. Original or not, ideas in this case, mustbe repeated.

1. Each person is individually intelligentand has certain problem solving responsibilities, with little

or no knowledge of either what other people do or how they do it. Each person either produces a

result herself/himself (does something) or reports results back to others in the community.

2. Each person is situationally intelligent and sensitive to her/his own surrounding environment,and is generally unaware of the full domain knowledge of everyone else. Thus, a person's

knowledge is limited to the tasks at hand with no knowledge of the total range or physical

constraints in certain problem solving tasks overall.

3. People are interactionally intelligent. That is, they form a collective of individuals who

cooperate on certain particular tasks that may be seen as a society, with shared knowledge, skills,

and responsibilities, when functioning as a collective, that are distributed across that population of

individuals.

4. A society of people is structurally intelligent so that for people-oriented problem solving, each

individual, having her/his own unique environment and skill set, will coordinate with other peoplein overall problem solving. Thus, a final solution will not only be seen as collective, but also as

cooperative.

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5. A society is synergetically intelligent. That is, although people possess sets of individual skills

and responsibilities, the overall cooperative result is greater than the sum of its individual

contributors. Intelligence is a phenomenon that is resident in and emerges from a society and is not

just a property of an individual person.

Thereforeintelligence is a phenomenon that emerges from society and is not just the

property of an individual person. Of course there will be a problem when we try to design acomputer to think like a human being, because we, in fact, learn through and from other people. It is

this interconnectivity between our minds that makes us unique, not just because we think, but

because we synergistically think and are influenced by the thinking of others. This synthetic,

accumulative and creative form of thinking connects everything we know together. And the creation

of an interconnective system (such as the Internet) will simply accelerate that process. We are not

just talking about the intelligence of the collective, which is augmented by the combined

intelligence of individuals. The intelligence of each individual will be amplified by the feedbackintelligence of the collective, which is also augmented by the intelligence of its contributors.

Intelligence, then, is the result of a dual feedback process that augments itself both individually and

collectively. Although certain physical (capacity) and thermodynamic (entropy) factors may limit

this process, the overall resultant measures of intelligence will tend to increase. It is not yet clearwhat the overall limits for increasing intelligence might be, since no serious attempts have been

made for measure or comparisons. Assuming that intelligence is a continually emerging

phenomenon of society, we may expect it to increase, rather than to achieve a static level, as long as

an overall society continues to develop. Internet expansion suggests continued development.

The strength of our interactions comes through complex coding and patterns of learning and

languages, some natural, some synthetic, and others artificial. While specialists may claim that their

fields explain all of this, there is a singular lack of overall explanation when we look at the big

picture. And it is unfortunate that too few risk more general explanations out of fear of being

ridiculed. Although it might be possible to create a dynamic simulation model of the process just

described, additional study and data would be needed to make a reasonable model for discussion.

And even then, it would only be a systemic representation of what we think, because that is what a

basic model is. The foregoing suggests a model for mental machinery that interconnects both

individual and collective intelligence. AI discussion usually welcomes a more general approach.

I encourage others to add to this discussion and consider the implications for the

development of human intelligence, for in the final analysis, man becomes what he thinks he is.

None of this, by the way, has anything to do with political argument. The synthetic linkage of dual

feedback intelligence between the individual and the collective negate the possibility of

overemphasizing either one or the other. But there are, of course, political implications.

I admit that I have freely paraphrased or borrowed from discussions and texts concerning

artificial intelligence, which while in one sense are rudimentary, do go back to important

fundamentals that help us to consider overall human intelligence and also suggest that the human

race has computing potentials that are vastly underestimated for our future. Nothing I say here is

original, but that is as it should be. We add our ideas to those of others and find new ways to

communicate them. If I have done this in any way, then I have accomplished the task of this article.

This article may be freely shared for educational, personal or non-commercial purposes.

Posted March, 2010 Liberia, Costa Rica

Direct Reference Internet Source:AI: EARLYHISTORY AND APPLICATIONS

www.cs.unm.edu/~luger/ai-final/Chap1fin6_11-15-07.pdf

http://www.cs.unm.edu/~luger/ai-final/Chap1fin6_11-15-07.pdfhttp://www.cs.unm.edu/~luger/ai-final/Chap1fin6_11-15-07.pdfhttp://www.cs.unm.edu/~luger/ai-final/Chap1fin6_11-15-07.pdfhttp://www.cs.unm.edu/~luger/ai-final/Chap1fin6_11-15-07.pdf