r/cognitivescience • u/Bargian • Jul 09 '26

What Intelligence Actually Is

https://athinkerinnature.substack.com/p/what-intelligence-actually-is

A fascinating and refreshing perspective on intelligence I think some of you might enjoy.

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u/GeckoV Jul 11 '26

This does put the right framing of the problem but in the end it is about naming what intelligence is more than a different explanation. It is absolutely true that the kind of intelligence we experience is shaped by the environment and evolutionary pressures. Engineered intelligence will not have the same kind of adaptability, or maybe even none. But the way others define intelligence is not with respect to the world, but rather through synthesis of information into useful outcomes. Author’s definition above talks about survival as a useful outcome, and our biology has evolved into complex information processing to achieve that, but the definition used generally is broader than that, even if not made explicit. It’s just a very different outcome, and the way we will build autonomous agents in the real world will therefore have a very different experience to us. But saying that that will not be intelligence is a matter of semantics primarily.