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What is being Really Intelligent?


behavioralist

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INTELLIGENCE as it is traditionally measured is in direct conflict with perception, because it is founded in extraneous interests called authority. If we learn because someone wants to vicariously exploit that learning (usually something he couldn’t learn himself; if he could the pecking order would keep him far down below the exploiters, because it is the family-trait of density of the mind that makes a jack-hammer of it), then we are apathetic about what we learn and interested only in the remuneration the exploiter is prepared to part with.

We do the one thing to get some other thing, and thereby we have precluded that first thing being inspired. Authority obviates the mind’s affinities, which are gauged and prioritized by emotion, to where we learn what we love, do what we love.

Consider two alternative rewards, survival and freedom. Survival can be denied us, and then freedom eventually ceases to surface as a goal.(Stockholm syndrome, observer-effect. mirroring the contempt that makes one a hostage in the view of another.) But survival is the pleasure of getting what you must have in order to continue being exploited, the pleasure of having resigned to living under the heel of another’s contempt; while freedom is the right to have absolute delight in living.

How do they compare, delight in pleasure and delight in living? The effects of LSD-like compounds almost mimic the natural delight in living, except that the perception-effect does not resurrect the lost social awareness. If we gave one to a cow it would also “tryp” (tryptamines) but the wild creatures would still find it a brute. The condition “docile” is an inescapable degree of dementia manifesting the time spent in captivity, and it means that evolution has become meaningless, basically non-existent or, as the science has it, “subconscious”.

Try the mental experiment in freedom. In your imagination, don’t go to school or to your job anymore. Don’t keep your stipend-related appointments. What happens after a few days or weeks of giddy freedom? You might well die; and there are worse things than dying! Very few of us live where we can wander off and live in a cave with only a fish-hook and a loincloth to our name.

Eventually progress will have people on Mars and not just in the snow, and it is not nature, either here or on Mars, that is the hostage-taker. It is always someone securely beyond your right to scrutinize, someone who will always read and verify your resume and school-record, but you will never demand to see his/hers.

If you have to earn a license or sheepskin you will never make any “real” money with it! And money is never the “more, more” Madonna once sang about (was it Dick Tracy?); it needs to be augmented with cocaine. Dense heads think they are ahead of the common lot when they have squeezed it dry, but their plans lead to their characteristic consequences, like Cinderella finding herself with separate bedrooms because royalty is not nice in private. No one ever is who has been called “Payday” instead of “Person” all his life..

The emotion of this intelligence we possess on behalf of the top predators cannot peak above pleasure, and education/programming and information/disinformation garner us the habit of never expecting to learn things that elevate us emotionally and permanently. Man is permanently fallen from the grace of freedom like those horses of old that pulled cabs until they “ran out of gas”.

What would there be that could elevate the emotions permanently? Consider senility and dementia, the place everyone’s mind is continuously plunging toward. Isn’t the inference that it is impossible to ask that question?

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Non-existent and subconscious are veery different, of course depending whether you have some exact and very highly-picked meaning for the word subconscious. But in general terms, subconscious is anything but a synonym for non-existent. It's a place from where a lot of influence -> existence comes, also a place not so easily under our control.

I doubt there's any one thing that can elevate emotions permanently, unless you consider the change between boring and dangerous a "one thing".

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behavioralist,

What is it you are actually arguing?

Are you arguing a case for personal expression being the only "intelligence", or are you simply arguing against authority?

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i'm obviously not intelligent enough to understand what you're getting at OP.

I also don´t get it. But it´s an indicator for intelligence when the brain separtes automatically the important from the unimportant to do

not take the unimportant into unneeded evaluation because it´s unimportant.

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I also don´t get it. But it´s an indicator for intelligence when the brain separtes automatically the important from the unimportant to do

not take the unimportant into unneeded evaluation because it´s unimportant.

i'm afraid to admit that I did understand that lol

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i'm afraid to admit that I did understand that lol

:tu:

Edited by toast
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loosely, I understand intellect to be the ability to absorb information and intelligence to be the ability to do something with it.

or some such thing.

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loosely, I understand intellect to be the ability to absorb information and intelligence to be the ability to do something with it.

or some such thing.

Ya, something north of that.

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I live in the west. is that a problem??

If you are watched from the south, no.

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loosely, I understand intellect to be the ability to absorb information and intelligence to be the ability to do something with it.

or some such thing.

The problem with people is that they provide the intellect with something that keeps intelligence off their spoor.

Edited by behavioralist
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The problem with people is that they provide the intellect with something that keeps intelligence off their spoor.

again, I do not understand your point.

why not try to just speak plain English. it's ok and it doesn't make you less intelligent I promise

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Non-existent and subconscious are veery different, of course depending whether you have some exact and very highly-picked meaning for the word subconscious. But in general terms, subconscious is anything but a synonym for non-existent. It's a place from where a lot of influence -> existence comes, also a place not so easily under our control.

I doubt there's any one thing that can elevate emotions permanently, unless you consider the change between boring and dangerous a "one thing".

Please consider the proverb "God is in the details". Clearly God is a whole new emotion, except that one presumably had it before the hell of the cradle.

As I intimated to AE a while ago, people design to make it seem simple to know them and to know the present around us. The simplistic version goes into memory, and seduces us away from the infinitely more complex present; which is that the perception becomes subconscious as the conscious becomes "all-knowing" in its own estimate.

It's unfriendly not to let people convince you to adopt their pretended self (in order to dissimulate their thinking self) as who they are, which is a very simple thing since it's hard to pretend to be profoundly complex.

And when you are little, a child, it is easy to intimidate you if you are not at least acting as if you are convinced. The big voice is already a bit overwhelming and when it gets a growl in it you shrink. So while you are little you are being coached in the habit of going along for your own good.

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...since it's hard to pretend to be profoundly complex.

you seem to have no trouble with it. your comments make little sense to me and border on useless verbosity.
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I would explain this all to you, but you probably wouldn't understand it. Bwa-ha-ha!

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again, I do not understand your point.

why not try to just speak plain English. it's ok and it doesn't make you less intelligent I promise

He's not saying just one thing, but one of the things he's saying us intelligent content is being given away too easily, in a stupidised form. It's true in a way, does make you think less, but it's just the easiness to decrypt the message I think so it seems to be about the diffculty of decrypting & interpreting it instead of thinking the actual thing. Because one takes away from another there.

And he's saying it's authority which originates from our own needs, that dictates that intelligence must be given in this stupidized, simple form. Basically saying we say things in plain language in order to get by in this pretentous make-believe world. We do. Efficiency in communication is an asset in survival situations and life's been about survival in the past. You lose the survival battle, and thinking becomes meaningless because you're either dead or a slave. We're just getting out of that phase, but it's sensible to be able to say things in plain language in case if you or your progenies ever needed to do the survival battle once again. Think about war, there you lose (your life and those of others) if you go using walls of texts about simple things. We'll always be in a state of war, or in the brink of it, one step away, whether it's a personal war for survival or a real real war. It's real and about your life in both cases tho. We do it to make there be a foundation for thinking, to make thinking meaningful.

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Mikko-kun has a point. You can't wear the deeper meanings as they are originally served up, but you can tailor them into respectable apparel. You can adorn and embelish your role, but you don't need to invest your whole mind in that simple agenda. Nothing is so annoying to the layman as having to listen to a lesson meant for the post-doc audience.

It is so much easier to choose an author who makes this respectable apperal to begin with, like Gibran and Dalai Lama. "To love is the only intelligent choice!", for example. The guy next to you on the commuter train will grasp that immediately and will not feel challenged by it, not feel you are taking him back to school for some learning higher than he signed up for.

But how can it be specialization to understand oneself? In behavioral and cognitive science the audience is man, and the professional is the least invested because he is just seeking his payday; it's his rut! If one ignores the reality of how one became oneself and how one degenerates into overt dementia one is either an utter fool or just damaged beyond all hope.

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Mikko-kun has a point. You can't wear the deeper meanings as they are originally served up, but you can tailor them into respectable apparel. You can adorn and embelish your role, but you don't need to invest your whole mind in that simple agenda. Nothing is so annoying to the layman as having to listen to a lesson meant for the post-doc audience.

It is so much easier to choose an author who makes this respectable apperal to begin with, like Gibran and Dalai Lama. "To love is the only intelligent choice!", for example. The guy next to you on the commuter train will grasp that immediately and will not feel challenged by it, not feel you are taking him back to school for some learning higher than he signed up for.

But how can it be specialization to understand oneself? In behavioral and cognitive science the audience is man, and the professional is the least invested because he is just seeking his payday; it's his rut! If one ignores the reality of how one became oneself and how one degenerates into overt dementia one is either an utter fool or just damaged beyond all hope.

I think you are channeling Jung... Or trying very hard successfully to write like him. ;) but the prose of old writing is a bit confusing to modern readers.

Edited by White Crane Feather
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the pleasure of having resigned to living under the heel of another’s contempt; while freedom is the right to have absolute delight in living.

Divorced father trying to brush off the idea that you once had children? Get up and shake it off as that was years ago and you were never really a father. Pay your dues, as the cave you speak of for the modern dad has non-spirited bars.

If you are careful you can chew on the grass so long as you keep your mouth shut and give them the milk. It is the act of chewing that feels like freedom.

Thanks

"I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots."

William Yeats

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  • 2 weeks later...

loosely, I understand intellect to be the ability to absorb information and intelligence to be the ability to do something with it.

or some such thing.

I think that is a really clear and correct definition. Nicely put.

You frequently have these claimed "highly gifted" people that come along and complain that the world doesnt understand them and they can't fit in anywhere. Can't get a job, can't get the right degree etc etc. And all this is because they say they are so smart they are on another level.

While i find that these just aren't intelligent people, or as JGirl puts it, don't have the intellect to direct their intelligence. Being intelligent would mean they can adjust to their surroundings (maybe a bit like evolution). They often fail at this and somehow put themselves on this pedestal, removing themselves even further from the world around them that they claim doesn't understand them. While it's them that don't undestand the world.

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From Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, 1602:

Malvalio:

In my stars I am above thee; but be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.

Apply and replace 'greatness' with 'intelligence' ~ 'intelligence' is in no way similar or the same as 'intelligent' ... :)

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Being smart is intellect; being wise is knowing when and when not to reveal it.

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As I intimated to AE a while ago, people design to make it seem simple to know them and to know the present around us. The simplistic version goes into memory, and seduces us away from the infinitely more complex present; which is that the perception becomes subconscious as the conscious becomes "all-knowing" in its own estimate.

Life and living is, at it's core, profoundly simple.

It is the presumption of creating complexity through over-analysis that generates the illusion that life is complex.

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