What is Intelligence: Introduction

Introduction

This book is filled with wild ideas! It is a product of long-term brooding over the topic of Intelligence and most especially how to build it. The thoughts contained in this work have consumed me for the greater part of my life on earth and I think it is about time I share it with the world.

This is not a research paper nor does this book seek to become an authority on what constitutes that aspect of human cognitive functioning which we call “intelligence”. This book is meant to be inspirational to the active coder/researcher working on some kind of AI project, it serves to expand the horizon of thought, playing with sacred ideas and even challenging them. Of course, there is a lot of bashing of popularly held ideas and some fresh ones that have not been considered seriously by the majority.

I act more like a prophet/philosopher than a scientist in this writing but the ideas contained here are very clear and if you keep an open mind it will challenge your current paradigm, expand it and enable you to start conceiving ideas you never thought about and eventually maybe lead you to start hacking them out on some new projects.

In the past scientist often gained inspiration from philosophers, and indeed most of these philosophers eventually became a scientist themselves or were actually practising scientists. Without a grounding philosophy, we don’t have a map to aid in our exploration of nature or any other field.

A poor philosophy will lead us to dead ends or make us try to answer the wrong questions because we didn’t even bother to ask the right questions in the first place.

This is the role I play here, I bring in new ideas and recast old ones in a new light. I emphasize certain directions and detract from others. I am a human being and I have preferences and what I write here are mostly what I prefer, I am not writing a reference manual or an encyclopedia, I am proposing intimate ideas that if looked at with sympathetic eyes and an understanding mind could lead us forward faster towards the goal of achieving substrate free synthetic intelligence (AGI (artificial general intelligence))