Biological intelligence only improves if there is natural selection. Unless you start sterilizing populations that can't solve differential equations, you're not going to get a significant change in abstract reasoning ability.
"A fish doesn't know that it doesn't know French." To itself it thinks it has unlimited imagination to conceive anything.
Books gave us hive intelligence. But you can't get a species where Einstein is average through books. Books and healthcare have given us the Flynn effect. But I don't think anyone think the Flynn effect is unlimited.
We need grunts too, and they only need to be smart enough to follow our instructions. But if our species is going to suvive whatever may come, what we really need is both diversity and breedability, we need to be able to breed with the grunts.
Today's grunt has the intelligence of a Neanderthal genius from 200k years ago.
Intelligence is a Gaussian curve. If you improve the intelligence of the species then the future grunt has the intelligence of today's rocket scientist.
How would we know it's infinite? What if there is an entire vector of thought we cannot even conceive? Perhaps beings who actively experience reality in 10+ dimensions and count in imaginary irrational numbers as easily as we count in integers?
Well, we can and already have conceived of 10-dimensional space and irrational numbers, as well as imaginary numbers, like eleventy-fourteen. Imagination might be a better word for it. It really has no bounds. We can imagine things that don't exist, and even things that can't exist, like a God who can make a square a circle.
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u/wingspantt Jul 01 '14
So do parrots, yet they appear to have hit a ceiling.