cladking
Well-Known Member
That's a good definition.
The problem with the definition though is one can be usually clever despite the inability to solve a specific problem. One can often display cleverness in one field and no other.
I can get on board with the definition however it is virtually impossible to quantify and its utility is limited. Of course as an abstraction we can't ask too much of the term anyway.
In Ancient Language "intelligence" was language acquisition. People learned as much language as they could starting at birth accelerating at two years of age and continuing through life as possible.
The problem is all things have an infinite number of causes. You couldn't roll a ball off the edge of a table if you didn't buy the ball, your grandfather hadn't made the table, and a different sperm cell had fertilized the egg that became you.
The best we can do is to isolate variables in an experiment to reduce reality to what we can comprehend but obviously Cern wouldn't exist if Sir Isaak Newton had not laid a theoretical foundation.
Just as all things affect all things in real time and forever, all experiment applies to all things at all times (until an experiment shows otherwise).
Cause precedes effect but how are we to know all the causes for love or war?
Yes. Exactly. That's why I equate all beliefs. Some beliefs are better supported by experiment than other but we each proceed on these beliefs. The problem here is that all science is eventually rewritten as more is learned. In this specific case Darwin has very much been rewritten and I believe there is sufficient evidence, experiment, and logic to largely rewrite "gradual change in species" and "survival of the fittest". Life is more about cooperation than competition. It is more about consciousness than fitness. Change always appears to be sudden (a few generations).
Yes, when it comes to mechanics, optics, and the like we excel at making predictions in the short term and the large scale. Long term and small scale our predictions always fail just as chaotic systems are unpredictable. Indeed, for most practical purposes long terms and small scale simply introduce too many chaotic variables. We don't predict nearly as well as most believe because in the real world most variables can't be quantified at all. In the real world most things will be determined by things that haven't happened yet and are not predictable.
Yes and no. It is the only science we have and it and reason are the only tools we have to understand reality.
The problem here is all modern science is by nature and by definition determined by experiment. "Experiment" reduces an aspect of nature to something that can be seem in the lab and them people want to extrapolate and interpolate experiment to understand reality. Much of reality is invisible to us because it can't be reduced to experiment at least at this time. There is simply an assumption, imparted largely by language, that these reductions can be used to see all of reality simultaneously. This is what everybody sees anyway; all of reality at once. We rarely notice every individual sees an entirely different reality because beliefs (models) vary so much.
Ancient science (all consciousness except homo omnisciencis) was (is) quite the opposite of reductionistic. It had(s) to see all of known reality at once in order to learn new things.
We aren't stuck with reductionistic science because machines can be programmed to use a different metaphysics. I believe the two sciences operating in tandem would be far more powerful than either alone.
Most importantly though we really need to get science unstuck. Jettisoning Darwin would be a huge step in the right direction. Science took a bad turn about 1819 and is still off course. While 19th century scientists were some of the best the planet has ever known, they made some fundamental mistakes that have set us on dangerous courses. Champollion, Darwin, Petrie, Freud, et al were simply wrong and their errors were largely caused by language and the way we think.
