What is intelligence, actually? The mind gathers data from everywhere, constantly, and most of it without our knowledge or consent. Everything seen, heard, touched, overheard, half read on the way past. It processes all of that against previous cases and produces conclusions, and the conclusions are often very good. That is the whole of it. Intelligence is data, arranged well.
Which means intelligence has an edge, and the edge is exactly where the data stops. Give it a situation resembling something it has seen before and it performs beautifully, faster and more reliably than we can follow. Give it something genuinely new, for which there is no case anywhere in its store, and it has nothing at all to offer.
And yet in those situations something answers. That is what cannot be accounted for, and it is worth returning to, year after year, without ever getting much further with it.
The first of anything
Consider any first. Before anybody had designed a particular thing, there was no example of it anywhere in the world. No data, no precedent, no previous case to reason from, nothing to compare against. And somebody, one afternoon, had the thought.
Where did that thought come from? Not from experience, because there was none to draw on. Not from information, because the information did not exist yet and would only exist afterwards, as a consequence. Something arrived that had no source in anything that person had ever been given, and it arrived complete enough to be acted on and built.
The same thing happens in far more ordinary ways, every day, without anybody remarking on it. Somebody faces a situation nobody has faced, with nothing whatsoever to consult, and does the right thing, and afterwards cannot explain how they knew. We call it instinct, or a hunch, or experience, though experience is precisely the thing that was absent.
Something underneath intelligence
There is something in us beyond intelligence, and it helps when the information runs out. What it is, nobody knows. What can be said is that it is quiet, and it is fast, and it does not argue, and it is very often right in a way that reasoning cannot match or explain afterwards.
It also does not survive being shouted over, and this is the whole difficulty. Intelligence is loud. It produces reasons, it can defend everything it says, it will provide three arguments before the other thing has finished its single word. The quiet one says that one word and does not repeat itself. In any contest between them intelligence wins on volume, and after enough years of that the quiet one is simply not consulted at all.
Instinct can go wrong, and that should be said plainly, because it certainly can. It goes wrong particularly when it is mixed with what we want, or with what we are afraid of, or with a judgement formed twenty years ago and never revisited. A prejudice can present itself as intuition very convincingly indeed. But an instinct that has been examined and still stands is a different order of thing from a conclusion, and the difference can be learnt.
The thing we are impressed by
Intelligence impresses us at the moment, and understandably so, because we have built machines that possess it in enormous quantity and they are genuinely extraordinary. They will keep improving. There is no version of this where a human being out-computes them, and that particular race was lost before anybody thought to enter it.
But the machine has exactly the same edge that we do. It works on what it has been given, and only on that. Present it with something truly unprecedented, for which there is no case anywhere in the whole of its store, and it will fail in the same place we fail, for precisely the same reason, and it will fail with great confidence.
So what fills that gap in us? Nobody knows. What is known is that it is there, that everybody has it, that it does not appear to be distributed according to education or advantage, and that most of us have spent our lives developing the other one instead. We have become very good at reasoning, and quite deaf, and we have no idea what we might have heard.
