not intelligence – intelligence is a complex topic. I adhere to Howard Gardner’s 6 intelligences work (note that my spell checker “corrects” me for making “intelligence” plural). intelligence, as we humans understand it, easily extends to primates, dogs, cats…

intellect, though, is another thing: intellect is to intelligence as musician is to music (kind of – because what is music? what is a musician?) on a basic level, intelligence is the mechanics of solving problems, problems here meaning situations which one wants to alter, to be distinguished from whining on the potty with kleenex about all your “problems”. the mechanical intelligence is essentially unalterable, biological, and every creature possesses it, without acquiring it.

we acquire knowledge, which augments or supplies intelligence. the acquisition of that knowledge is widely varied in its method: some go to endless college, where they intake that which they think will augment their intelligence in beneficial ways – in ways that will allow them to solve specific problem sets. doctors want to solve medical problems. for this, they require medical knowledge.

but of course, intelligence, as Gardner tells us, is not generic – its variance is myriad. you could use a word like “aptitude”, if you fear intelligence types. So, a doctor with tons of medical knowledge, can be terrible at solving medical problems even worse, a doctor can substitute problem solving (intelligence) with sophisticated application of knowledge blocks – not unlike modern AI “RAG” retrievel mechanisms, where by questions are answered by retrieving appropriate text blocks from articles, rapidly, and collating them into actionable from. in AI, this uses vectors – long chains of similarity of ideas, from which the machine chooses “the best”. not to be too esoteric here – you know these people: they are great standardized test takers. there are legends of people who run a racket of memorizing huge chunks of written data, in preparation for competitive tests – even sell their skills on the black market.

But worse yet are those who flood the professions today, completely unequipped to apply intelligence – critical thinking, analysis, synthesis – all words gone by the wayside in modern times. This is the doctor who, in 15 minutes, discerns the type of cancer you have (this, discernment, is indeed a type of intelligence), but then skips the deduction, and jumps to sophisticated code matching, to produce the cause and the treatment of this type (“label”) of cancer that you have. and then they proceed to kill you – because the human body is so complex, as is a modern pathology like cancer, that text retrieval is highly likely to pick the wrong similarity. this is also compounded by the nature of the the texts which are produced today – also flawed by the industrial nature of research and research writing – there is no money in finding the needle in the haystack – in fact, that needle is usually the thing that disproves your whole thesis, and hell, you don’t have time to truly follow the scientific method!

I’ve wandered again. got hung up on widely diversified intelligence, battling with highly specialized knowledge storage and retrieval. what I was aiming at was a dinosaur – the intellectual; the intellect. a dying or dead breed of person who, through rigid social structure, was forced to learn a raft of non-specialized knowledge, for some unstated reason. the opposite of OBE (objectives based education). The “objective” was to become an intellectual – something pretty esoteric, but supported socially. It was part of social selection in the intelligentsia to regularly quote esoteric Heraclitus, in the context of rhetorically complex argumentation, to “win” a likewise intellectual point. mental masturbation, in its most common application.

to this end, one learned Latin, Greek, plus a modern language, and, not just at the SAT level. there were aged task masters, whose claim to position was exactly their pedantry. because you can’t really learn this shit without repetition and rote memorization.

I could take a moment here to talk about Picasso – this painter who is famous for abstraction. Picasso started out in the grueling, pedantic system of classical painting – did hundreds of non-abstract drawings of tables, flowers, etc., with no hope of abstraction – because he was the germinal inventor of abstraction! at some point, he began “cubism” – whereby you abstract simple geometric shapes, from those rigid “classical” 3-point-persepctive drawings. this process evolved into his ultimate abstractions. but none of this could have happened without his being inundated with the entire history of rendering, and forced to replicate it.

so the intellectual is the product of excessive education, an acuity to problem solving intelligence, and, of course, a wild spirit longing for freedom.