At the Core of Intelligence
I've been reading GODEL-ESCHER-BACH and came across the definition of intelligence (p.26):
Essential abilities for intelligence are:
- to respond to situations very flexibly;
- to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances;
- to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages;
- to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation;
- to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them;
- to find distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them;
- to synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new ways;
- to come up with ideas which are novel.
Rodney Cotterill in ENCHANTED-LOOMS defines inteligence in a similar way (p.6):
...the defining features of intelligence are the faculty for learning from experience, and the ability to apply acquired knowledge to fresh circumstances. ...[it] entails the ability both to imagine a variety of scenarios and to discern between consequences that are similar but not identical. The handling of novel situations thus implies categorization, association and generalization.
In his interview MIND-A-MOVING-STORY that was taken after the book was published, Cotterill refined his definition of intelligence into:
...a measure of the ability to link elementary motor elements into more complex movement scenarios.