Here’s a question that I like to ask: What is more important to the function of a car – having an engine or having wheels?
After I ask the question, I close my eyes and cross my fingers and hope I don’t hear an answer that is either “the engine” or “the wheels.” Sometimes it seems to me that all of our problems in the world are caused by people who think that everything can be sorted into neat categories.
The correct answer – in the sense that the person giving it demonstrates reasoning ability – is something along the lines of, “They are equally important if you need to get someplace far, and either the wheels or the engine is unavailable.” I would also give partial credit for the answer, “It depends which one you can get replaced faster and more economically, and the degree to which time or money is a constraint.”
But my experience has been that people say something like, “The engine. No, the wheels. Is that right? No, the engine. I mean, the wheels.” And then I silently weep.
Humans have two impulses that are very handy and very dangerous at the same time. We automatically sort things into categories in our mind, and we automatically rank things in importance. Most of the time, those are useful impulses. For example, the first time you see something that you have never seen before, you almost always know right away if you should eat it or run away from it. Categories matter.
Ranking things by their importance is also a practical skill. We’d all agree, for example, that you should save a baby from a burning building before saving your iPod, at least until Steve Jobs closes the gap with the next version.
This reflex that we have for sorting and ranking everything is essential for survival. But it gets us in trouble when applied to the Big Questions. For example, if I asked you which part of a person makes him intelligent, you’d probably say his brain, and not his hair or his toenails.
But what about his lungs? If you remove a person’s lungs, the brain doesn’t work. So, are lungs a part of the function of his intelligence? Logically, they are. But because they look sort of separate, and do something sort of different, our minds don’t let us say that your intelligence includes your entire respiratory system, and your digestive system, etc. It offends our natural ways of categorizing things.
How about oxygen, and gravity, and the distance of the Earth from the sun? Are they part of your intelligence too? Reflexively, you’d say no. It’s way different. And yet, if you fiddled with any of those things, your body would be destroyed and your intelligence would instantly stop operating.
Now let’s look inside the brain itself. Are the parts of the brain that don’t control conscious thoughts also part of intelligence? All they do is keep your body functioning, which in turn keeps the “smart” part of your brain working. But the “dumb” parts of your brain are just responding to stimuli, and not actually intelligent. Are they a part of your intelligence? After all, they are part of your brain, even if they aren’t doing the smarty-pants stuff.
Within the part of your brain that we all agree is intelligent – the part that controls conscious thoughts – is a whole bunch of molecules that are not themselves intelligent. It is only their collective actions – supported by a host of players from your lungs to the sun – that create actions and internal sensations (consciousness) that we call intelligence.
It’s natural to categorize your brain as the “important part” of your intelligence, and to regard everything from your lungs to the position of the sun as mere supporting players. But it isn’t logical, because all of those supporting players are 100% necessary. Remove one, and there is no intelligence. If something is 100% necessary, it is by definition one of the important parts.
Then there’s the problem of deciding when intelligence is actually happening. Every action is nearly (if not literally) the tail of an infinite series of causes and effects tracing back to the Big Bang. Your brain is the result of all the experiences and genetic machinations since your birth. So when you say, “My favorite color is yellow,” when did that intelligence start?
Did it start when you were first asked your favorite color, or did it start at conception, when your DNA was formed in a way that when it interacted with your environment you would form a preference for yellow by the time the question was asked?
To me, it seems that intelligence is an ongoing process, supported by an infinite number of potential inputs, and your brain is just one part of the process. I think that your brain creates intelligence no more than your radio writes the music that comes out of it. Your brain, like the radio, is a filter through which some bits of the universe’s inputs are channeled. Intelligence – if that word has any meaning – is the full sequence of events that contribute to the intelligent outcome.
Consciousness is nothing but the tickle we get as the inputs pass through our filters.
Still, some of you will protest that I have done nothing here but called the brain a filter. And filtering is completely different from all the other activities that contribute to life. So intelligence is still a function of the brain, you will say.
I’ll agree with that, but only if you agree that a car without wheels is transportation.