dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu (Daniel Mocsny) (12/05/90)
On several occasions contributors to this newsgroup have suggested that external methods of augmenting human intelligence, such as literacy, are equivalent to increasing human intelligence. While I agree that the aggregate human intellectual product has increased, I note that this has been done without a single objective measure that we could interpret as an increase in the average individual intelligence. People still are able to keep only 4 to 7 simple concepts in short term memory at one time. The time required to master particular skills seems constant. Finally, nowhere has anyone identified, much less engineered, any change in physical brain structure that could have increased intelligence. So how is the same old species getting more done with the same old meatware? Answer: by using the limited intellectual resources more efficiently. May we regard this as equivalent to having smarter people? Yes and no. Consider the following analogy. A man lives in a remote area, and keeps a horse which he rides to town once a week. The trip is arduous, involving many obstacles: rugged terrain, dense thickets, swampy lowlands. The horse and rider struggle for hours each way, expending great energies. How might the man increase the speed of travel? Two methods are obvious: (1) Increase the strength of the horse; (2) Construct a road. Over a small range of performance improvements, the methods are equivalent. A stronger horse is able to clamber over the steep slopes, tear through the thickets, and slog across the swamps more quickly. Building a road, on the other hand, requires a great investment in effort, but afterward the trip poses fewer obstacles, and the horse is able to use its strength much more productively. Even a weak horse on a road can beat a champion hobbled by a sorry trail. However, once a good road exists, a given horse will asymptotically approach its maximum speed on a perfect road. Investing more effort into perfecting the road will yield decreasing returns. If faster travel is still desirable, the only way to realize it will be to get a horse with a "bigger motor". With this picture in mind, we can begin to make sense of the claims that inventions such as writing, mathematics, etc., have "increased" human intelligence. These inventions have done for the mind exactly what clearing the thickets, leveling the hills, and filling the swamps does for the horse. They remove unproductive obstacles to thought. Building a road is re-engineering part of the physical world to better suit the capabilities of the horse. Building our libraries, institutions of learning, communication systems, etc., is re-engineering part of the world to better suit the capabilities of our minds. Instead of flailing at intellectual thickets, we travel smoothly to our destination. However, just as a better road leaves the horse unchanged, so too our intellectual contrivances do nothing to increase the objectively measurable capacities of our minds. If this is correct, then we should expect to see some readily-approachable limit to the improvement in intellectual performance realizable through manipulating the environment. I suggest that such limits may already have been realized in isolated instances. For example, suppose one of us were surrounded by the finest experts and tutors in some particular field that money could hire. (Some sufficiently rich people may have done this.) For each of us, some lower bound would exist on the time necessary for us to master that field, and no amount of skilled teaching, etc., could lower that. However, I have no doubt that we have barely begun to engineer our intellectual environment as effectively as we might. We still do not have an effective means for preventing thousands of people from independently re-inventing solutions to any given problem. Ideally, as soon as one person has learned to solve a problem, that solution should be instantly and transparently available to whoever might need it. But this job of matching millions of different problems to their recorded solutions is itself an appalling intellectual task. We are barely beginning to formulate it, much less vanquish it. -- Dan Mocsny Snail: Internet: dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu Dept. of Chemical Engng. M.L. 171 dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu University of Cincinnati 513/751-6824 (home) 513/556-2007 (lab) Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0171