6.1 Intelligence.

“Intelligence” is a folk concept. The phenomenon is not well-defined – or rather any attempt to do so amounts to a stipulative definition that doesn’t “carve Nature at the joints”. The Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) psychometric theory of human cognitive abilities is probably most popular in academia and the IQ testing community. But the Howard Gardner multiple intelligences model, for example, differentiates “intelligence” into various spatial, linguistic, bodily-kinaesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic and existential intelligence rather than a single general ability (“g“). Who’s right? As it stands, “g” is just a statistical artefact of our culture-bound IQ tests. If general intelligence were indeed akin to an innate scalar brain force, as some advocates of “g” believe, or if intelligence can best be modelled by the paradigm of symbolic AI, then the exponential growth of digital computer processing power might indeed entail an exponential growth in intelligence too – perhaps leading to some kind of Super-Watson. Other facets of intelligence, however, resist enhancement by mere acceleration of raw processing power.

 

One constraint is that a theory of general intelligence should be race-, species-, and culture-neutral. Likewise, an impartial conception of intelligence should embrace all possible state-spaces of consciousness: prehuman, human, transhuman and posthuman.

 

The non-exhaustive set of criteria below doesn’t pretend to be anything other than provisional. They are amplified in the sections to follow.

 

Full-Spectrum Superintelligence entails:

 

 

1. the capacity to solve the Binding Problem, i.e. to generate phenomenally unified entities from widely distributed computational processes; and run cross-modally matched, data-driven world-simulations of the mind-independent environment. (cf. naive realist theories of “perception” versus the world-simulation or “Matrix” paradigm. Compare disorders of binding, e.g. simultanagnosia (an inability to perceive the visual field as a whole), cerebral akinetopsia (“motion blindness”), etc. In the absence of a data-driven, almost real-time simulation of the environment, intelligent agency is impossible.)
2. a self or some non-arbitrary functional equivalent of a person to which intelligence can be ascribed. (cf. dissociative identity disorder (DID or “multiple personality disorder”), or florid schizophrenia, or your personal computer: in the absence of at least a fleetingly unitary self, what philosophers call “synchronic identity”, there is no entity that is intelligent, just an aggregate of discrete algorithms and an operating system.)
3. a “mind-reading” or perspective-taking faculty; higher-order intentionality (e.g. “he believes that she hopes that they fear that he wants…”, etc): social intelligence. The intellectual success of the most cognitively successful species on the planet rests, not just on the recursive syntax of human language, but also on our unsurpassed “mind-reading” prowess, an ability to simulate the perspective of other unitary minds: the “Machiavellian Ape” hypothesis. Any ecologically valid intelligence test designed for a species of social animal must incorporate social cognition and the capacity for co-operative problem-solving. So must any test of empathetic superintelligence.
4. a metric to distinguish the important from the trivial. (Our theory of significance should be explicit rather than implicit, as in contemporary IQ tests. What distinguishes, say, mere calendrical prodigies and other “savant syndromes” from, say, a Grigori Perelman who proved the Poincaré conjecture? Intelligence entails understanding what does – and doesn’t – matter. What matters is of course hugely contentious.)
5. a capacity to navigate, reason logically about, and solve problems in multiple state-spaces of consciousness [e.g. dreaming states (cf. lucid dreaming), waking consciousness, echolocatory competence, visual discrimination, synaesthesia in all its existing and potential guises, humour, introspection, the different realms of psychedelia (cf. salvia space, “the K-hole” etc)] including realms of experience not yet co-opted by either natural selection or posthuman design for tracking features of the mind-independent world. Full Spectrum Superintelligence will entail cross-domain goal-optimising ability in all possible state-spaces of consciousness. And finally 
6. “Autistic”, pattern-matching, rule-following, mathematico-linguistic intelligence, i.e. the standard, mind-blind cognitive tool-kit scored by existing IQ tests. High-functioning “autistic” intelligence is indispensable to higher mathematics, computer science and the natural sciences. High-functioning autistic intelligence is necessary – but not sufficient – for a civilisation capable of advanced technology that can cure ageing and disease, systematically phase out the biology of suffering, and take us to the stars. And for programming artificial intelligence.

We may then ask which facets of full-spectrum superintelligence will be accelerated by the exponential growth of digital computer processing power? Number six, clearly, as decades of post-ENIAC progress in computer science attest. But what about numbers one-to-five? Here the picture is murkier.

 

–  David Pearce, extract from The Biointelligence Explosion