Latenscracia: Intelligence does not exist.
Prefatory Words
The following essay was written in one sitting one afternoon in August 2021, starting from a tweet by Lex Fridman. I'm open to talking through these ideas so they can be improved or thrown out.
Latenscracia
The left mocks the right for being "dumb".
— Lex Fridman (@lexfridman) August 7, 2021
The right mocks the left for being "dumb".
Maybe let's try empathy and not mockery.
But…
What is intelligence? Does having a Nobel Prize make you intelligent? Does having an IQ of 200 make you intelligent? Does having made the Mona Lisa make you intelligent? Does holding political position X make you intelligent? Does generating new theories about our universe make you intelligent?
We're all full of biases; this essay is an example of that, we all make bad decisions, we're all stupid at some point.
Maybe intelligent humans don't exist, only interesting humans. Borges, Feynman, Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein, Tesla, Ben Franklin, von Neumann, Gödel, Bach, Ada Lovelace were all interesting, not intelligent. It hurts me to put this into words.
Intelligent people don't exist, only interesting people who know how to process a lot of information, remember it, fuse it, and know how to use it when it's needed.
But why would an idiot of 19, me, boast that the greatest geniuses in history are only interesting and not intelligent?
Imagine if cats had their own feline system for measuring intelligence, there is a cat more intelligent than the others, but only in the cat world.
The same thing happens with humans, we have our own narratives for measuring intelligence, unfortunately unless an intergalactic civilization on Kardashev scale 2 or 3 that's more “intelligent” than us or our computers shows up, most humans will die without knowing what it really means to be intelligent.
There's a word I invented when I was 16 in a short thesis on visual pollution. That was the first time I gave it a formal use, in my innocence I also sent it to the RAE so they'd add it to the dictionary; I've spent months looking for that email it was a very funny and elegant rejection, back to the point, the word is: Latenscracia, it means hidden power. And it's the closest thing my brain can use to make a definition of intelligence. The definition of intelligence is a hidden power that will be revealed when we have a debate with other races of the universe that have more knowledge than we do or some form of intelligence superior to ours like “a super AGI”. It would be funny to realize that part of our physics and mathematics is wrong. Other cases of Latenscracia are the existence of God or the meaning of consciousness. Latenscracia is those topics humans entertain themselves debating, but still can't reach a general scientific or real consensus, they only work with the best they have.
This essay isn't finished I consider that I'm only touching a symptom and not the real cause. Most people who talk about intelligence lack reasoning, I'm sure there are biases and flaws in the text. Also, it was initially going to be a scientific essay on AI I don't know how it ended up being a precarious essay about life. Sometimes, I can't even express my feelings well because I'm limited by language. And there comes another Latenscracia, is there a better way of communicating?. Spanish, English, Chinese, French, all these languages will disappear at some point, it's the law of life, What comes next? The language from the movie Planeta Libre? The language of the aliens in "Arrival"? Or something my small immature brain can't decipher?.
This content isn't original it's very likely someone has already said a similar version of my essay; a variant of hermeneutics of suspicion, maybe the only original thing in the universe is the Big Bang, of course, if it really happened. What I do believe is being among the few who approach the left-right political debate with a question that, at first glance, has nothing to do with it, What is intelligence?. When we discover it we'll be able to generate more satisfying economic models. Then again these ideas aren't that interesting. In the end I don't know why I'm writing this, I'm not interested in politics. Nor do I pretend to make a Copernican turn in the linguistic world.
Now I'm just curious to see what the universe will be like when humans reach eternal life, when we have healthy debates with beings more evolved than us and when we discover what's inside a black hole, after that I can die much happier.