Definition of intelligence

publish #needswork Musings on philosophy

In short: the ability to explain one’s thoughts. I think plenty of folks are capable of performing extraordinarily mentally taxing tasks (e.g. software engineering, investment banking). Yet they are unable to describe their reasoning behind certain decisions.

I’m not quite capturing my thoughts here, but in a nutshell I think a good definition of intelligence is being able to explain oneself. This proficiency is not a binary; some are more capable than others. I wonder at what point of the proficiency spectrum we would say an AGI has achieved its title.

2022-06-16 after writing in Beyond the Turing Test: I guess it might be useful to distinguish between “strong intelligence” and “weak intelligence” as I know many AIs who exhibit weak intelligence yet are not sentient. I also know many humans who fail to consistently exhibit strong intelligence yet are reasonably assumed to be sentient creatures.