Intelligence

I saw a Jay today. The bird in question had a large chunk of stale bread in its beak, far too large to swallow. I watched it fly into a nearby tree in order to scrape the chunk of bread against a branch, breaking it into much smaller pieces as it did so.

As a simple creature prone to biting off more than he can chew, I was struck by the wonderful sophistication of this act. This was, to my mind, a remarkable display of intelligence. By total contrast, I have also seen a seagull attempt to swallow a Cornish pasty whole. Which is, even for a bird, pretty stupid.

I'm very interested in the way that we think about intelligence. And in particular the idea that intelligence is at least as much about identifying one's own limitations as it is about overcoming them. The experience of finitude and limitation as the condition that gives birth to innovation and imagination.

 We have to know that something is a problem before we can possibly attempt to solve it. The jay, whether by experience or deduction, knew that it couldn't swallow the bread whole. It's first experience was of its own physical limitations in relation to what it wanted to achieve, after which the problem was clear and the solution identifiable.

I suspect that a lot of what we might want to call "instrumental intelligence" functions in the same way. This first instance is an experience of finitude. The exercise of intelligence is the attempt to overcome this finitude.

I think that the experience of finitude or limitation is in some way fundamental to much of what we might want to call intelligence, instrumental or otherwise. To realise that we need to work together on something, I perhaps need first to realise that I cannot do it alone. To write poetry, we perhaps first need to live inside the boundaries of language and experience its limitations. To know what constitutes justice, we must perhaps first experience or witness injustice.

In any given moment we are "thrown" in the world, within a history, a culture and a concrete physical setting. As long as we are unaware of that into which we are thrown, of that which we are given, our thoughts and actions are likely to be constrained by it. To act only in the ways which are given to us is to act without the exercise of intelligence. The exercise of intelligence is, perhaps, the capacity to work with what is given in order to transcend this initial situation. This begins with some experience, conscious or otherwise, of oneself as finite and limited by that which is given, and the desire or drive to overcome this.

This is, necessarily, a partial and perspectival characterisation of a complex and pervasive phenomenon (and one which risks placing far too much emphasis on innovation and creativity against general cognitive capacity, if taken in a very general sense and not considered in relation to particular situations and examples). But I do think it is a model that allows us to incorporate and understand the place of two particular aspects of intelligence that I think are very valuable.

The first of these is the idea of play. Play is a phenomenon that appeals to many who discuss the nature of creativity and intelligence. It is also something that is, to the best of my knowledge, an important part of how we learn and of how intelligent creatures interact with one another. I feel that it fits in nicely with what I have been discussing here as it seems to me that one of the definitive features of anything we might characterise as play is that it occurs against the background of some set of limitations or constraints. These limitations can take the form of some finite set of entities (a ball against and a wall, for example), within a set of rules that define a game, or at least within some particular setting (such as in games of make-believe, wherein we imagine ourselves and play-out scenarios in some particular situation). But the play itself, to some extent at least, exists in exploring the possibilities presented by and manifestable within these constraints. We need the paint and the canvas to work with and against before we can create the painting. Play, as an aspect of intelligence, is precisely the play that occurs with our own finitude.

Secondly, and far more overtly, I think that the experience of finitude is integral to learning. In particular the kind of learning that we achieve through trial and error, as opposed to the mere accumulation and memorisation of "knowledge". We learn far more if we are allowed, and if we allow ourselves, to make mistakes. To try and fail is perhaps the most explicit experience of finitude most of us have in our day-to-day lives. It is to run up against the limitations of our own capacities and understanding, to take a leap and then fall short. But in falling short we come to experience our limitations first hand, and to understand them better. We learn. We can then take this experience into account when we next come to make a leap into the unknown. Once again, this ability to learn from experience and, in particular, from our own and other people's mistakes is, for me, a key aspect of intelligence.

So even if it doesn't work as a definition, I think that there might be at least something to be said of thinking about intelligence this way; as the experience of and attempt to overcome our own finitude.

Either way, I reckon that jay was on to something.