Well this thread served a good distraction from work.
However I am not going to suffer these attempts to invalidate my point on the basis of 'childishness' as defined by internet forum goers.
So heres my take on the whole thing, no room for assumptions of interpretation.
@ AV/frotaz
Humans have varying mental capacities. While some people have strong physical attributes, some people can witness open-eye surgery, some can show true courage and some can think quickly. There is no aspect of the human brain which is black and white. Even something such as right/left handers, there is no clear two sides and there are all shades of grey in-between. All aspects of our mental and bodily powers are different, and fall over a range. Whether it is our height, our ability to hear high frequency sounds or our compassion to those less fortunate, we can not be equal.
When dealing with physical differences, it is obvious and one can easily draw a scale of those who are more capable than others. when it comes to mental though, its not so simple, however it can always be observed. If two people walk past a beggar and one donates while the other kicks dirt in their face, one can easily measure a persons compassion. if one is a doctor while the other throws up at the sight of blood, we can tell which one is 'mentally stronger' in taking in these images. In fact if you think of ANY human attribute, physical or mental, you can easily define a smaller and a larger amount.
By defining a difference, you have therefore created a line where any person on this earth can fall on this line. Again, try to name any human emotion, feeling, or thought which you can not tell me examples of a minimum and maximum. Its just not possible.
The point being; do any of these attributes exist in outside of Earth. If I capture a lightyear cubed area of space outside the earth, will I find empathy? Will I find the colour 'red'? Of course not; every single human thought is limited to us and our labels. Its how we define our world. There is no single aspect of human brain behaviour which is not limited to us, which we have not labelled.
My point here is, dismissing any aspect of human thought as merely a label is an incredibly large fallacy. To deny its existence is to deny every other thought we have through the exact same reasoning. Lets look at empathy. 1) Does it exist outside the human mind? No. Does it affect our lives? Yes. Can I find 2 people on this earth and safely say that one person is more empathetic than the other? Of course. Is it a label? Yes. Hopefully that is enough to show you, that dismissing ANYTHING pertaining to the human mind as a label is just wrong. There are countless processes that go on in our brain and you are attempting to draw a fat line between every single one of those, and the word intelligence.
Now back to the start...
Just one aspect of what makes us unique is our ability to come to rational conclusions to real life problems quickly and efficiently. This is observable through every single decision you ever make in your life. Whether it is deciding if you want to hit snooze one more time on the alarm, if you want to waste more time of your life typing on a forum or if you want to put a deeper foundation for a skyscraper. To do any task in life first requires you to have first obtained the relevant information, you cant drive somewhere if you dont know the way. Then you have to store it, and then retrieve it. This applies to EVERY decision one can make in life. The efficient process of this, as kewkky pointed out, is defined as 'intelligence'. It affects all 3 factors. There is our ability, or even desire, to acquire new information. Our brains physical capacity to store it which is strengthened through practice and the recall which again, strengthened through practice.
This efficiency in practice has 2 outcomes and 2 outcomes only. The result; and the time taken to do it. The combination of these two factors forms what we have labelled intelligence. Someone who arrives at the correct answers in life quickly, is defined as more intelligent than someone who takes longer, to come to the wrong answer. As before, this is identical to empathy. Another example; courage. How great the risk of death must be, before someone will willingly take the risk to help another while being fully aware of the consequences. Its quite a hard thing to measure, but when the situation arises, the difference will be clear as day.
Now of course the issue with intelligence, is that it is so far reaching, how can we hope to measure something which attempts to cover all lifes decisions? Its simple. It is not a static value; it is an average. Over the course of our lives, we will all make millions of decisions. These will affect us and others around us. People will notice if one person repeatedly catches the wrong bus or someone who can compose music very well. Over all this exposure, we as humans doing what we do best, trying to categorise and quantify everything, will remember on average how many times someone makes the more correct decisions, and how long it takes them to do it. This proportion is nothing by itself however when we compare two people who have vastly different rates of correct decisions, we can see a difference. We do not care about the minimum or maximum, only that there is a difference. humankind has decided to give a name to this observed human behaviour. it was called intelligence. Much the same, they repeated this process for logic, colours, morals, ethics and a wide range of things which do not exist by themselves, but when compared to others, they begin to form a line between small and large.
The average difference between the amount of correct answers and the speed at which people make them in life has been observed. This difference needs a word to describe it for our own purposes. A word was given to it. That is all.
To disagree with the concept of 'intelligence' is to disagree on a difference in our ability to think quickly and make correct decisions. This would be true on one condition only; A spectrum does not exist. If humans were not unique and we all have the exact same levels of empathy, morals etc, one could argue this is possible. Clearly this is not the case. To deny a spectrum exists is to claim all humans are equal in one aspect alone. To this I argue; Find me a rugby player, and a university professor. Tell me honestly that the rugby has the exact same chance of making every single decision involved in a day, in the same time frame. Now ask yourself; if this was so easy, why do people say that school is hard, yet others find it easy? Do they choose to make it hard for themselves? What is stopping them? Is it their willpower to learn more? That is a factor intelligence. Is it their inability to store so much information? That is a factor of intelligence. Is it because they cant remember well? That is a factor of intelligence.
Remember this;
Good can not exist without Evil.
Smart can not exist without dumb.
If everyone in this world was of the same smartness, why has anyone ever disagreed on anything, surely we should all arrive at the exact same conclusion at the same time.
Also, you realize Stephen Hawking is brain damaged right?
Do you realise that reading is hard, why dont you actually find out what is wrong with him?
