According to the experts, there are many forms of intelligence. Standard IQ tests only capture a few types. But you can also have musical intelligence, social intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, and so on.
One type of intelligence that I never hear discussed – and might be the most important one – is the degree to which you believe you are “special.” Or to put it bluntly, the more special you believe you are, the stupider you are.
Your belief in your own specialness will blunt your conventional intelligence when it comes to many types of decisions. For example, if you are an Elbonian, and believe Elbonians are extra special, your approach to a problem will be “How should an Elbonian solve it?” as opposed to “What’s the best solution?” The next thing you know, you’re boiling a newt during a full moon to cure a headache, even though you have aspirin in the cupboard and know what it’s for.
It’s one thing to want your favorite sports team to win, but if you take it another step and emotionally despise other teams, and feel sick when your team loses, you probably have specialness issues.
If you have the same religion or political affiliation as your parents or your community – considering all the different choices available to you – then you probably have specialness problems.
Specialness is most dangerous when applied to your political affiliation, your religion, and your ethnicity. Political debate is dominated by people with the highest feelings of specialness in those categories. These people identify with a political view and subordinate their conventional intelligence to make their opinions fit with the group. Nothing good can come from that. If you pick any major problem in the world, chance are that the root cause is people feeling special.
When I discussed in this blog the question of whether the universe is intelligent, the people who believe humans are special objected, although they didn’t couch it in those terms. The objectors imagine Shakespeare writing those plays – a special human just like them – while discounting the contribution of the big old unspecial universe that gave cause to him. For this group, their conventional IQ is quite high, as evidenced by the sophistication of their arguments about proximate causes and semantics and intent and quantum randomness. But in the end, their conventional intelligence is thwarted by their sense of specialness. They are skeptics, damn it, and skeptics don’t accept an intelligent universe, no matter what that dictionary says is an acceptable definition of intelligence.
Those who objected to the notion of an intelligent universe argued that it’s the humans who have the intelligence, not the universe to which they belong. This distinction seems right only if you start from an assumption that humans are a special classification. The logic of it breaks down when you realize that the “intelligent” part of a human is only a small bit of the brain. Humans as a whole are 99.9% unintelligent. A “person” is mostly a support system for a relative few molecules that are nothing but the latest step in a 15 billion year process beginning at the big bang. We want to call the human the only intelligent part of the universe because, well, we are humans. That other stuff that keeps us alive – the sun, the energy, the oxygen, and the laws of physics are trivial compared to our human importance on the issue of intelligence, the skeptics say.
Yet, if you take away the rest of the universe, your body and the intelligent part of your brain die almost instantly. The universe is logically inseparable from the person in terms of importance to intelligence. Granted, the asteroids whizzing past us don’t have much direct impact on supporting our intelligence, but neither does your hair and your toenails, and we easily include those in the package we call an intelligent creature.
You can judge your own specialness quotient by your reaction to this post. If you are chuckling to yourself because humans are indeed inconsequential in the big scheme of things, you probably have no specialness issues. But if you are already writing a comment involving free will, quantum uncertainty, proximate causes, and alternate dictionary definitions of intelligence, you probably have a specialness problem.