A quick post, about something that has been occupying my mind for some time. I’ll just lay it out here. Intelligence is a skill, not a talent or a natural predisposition, nor a inherent quality. It is not a talent, because the word “talent” implies something innate, which I reject, and similarly is not an inherent quality either, bred in the genes. Neither is intelligence a natural predisposition, because intelligence is not a consequence of a mind naturally comported to learn.
Intelligence is a skill, because intelligence is the result of the willingness of a person to bend his or her energies in the pursuit of knowledge, and in that pursuit of knowledge, to grow in that knowledge by firstly, acquiring it, then taking it apart, and then acquiring it anew. As such, intelligence is as much a will to learn as it is the consequent of a technique of learning.
(I’m not trying to be profound, so just ignore me for a sec.)
Why is it so much easier to destroy than to create? Because it is far easier to bring order to disorder, because disorder has no thought-through shape or form. Order, inherently, is form. I could build a skyscraper out of lego blocks, that takes some doing. I could destroy it and reduce that skyscraper into its constituent lego blocks, that would be easy. But reducing a skycraper to just this pile of lego bricks, or these piles of lego bricks, in these shapes or for stray lego bricks to fall in just such an order, that takes some doing.
The same follows with ideas. Ideas have a certain structure. It is easy to take apart an idea; reductios prove that abundantly. But to take apart an idea constructively, that takes some doing. And to take apart an idea constructively requires that I understand that idea completely.
So when I endeavour to take apart an idea, a truism or an argument constructively, I do two things: I learn, and I learn how to make that idea stronger, or weaker; I learn how to pursue it to its logical conclusion; I learn how it stands in relation to other ideas, because as ideas do not stand in isolation from other ideas, by taking them apart, I find the roots from which these ideas arose. And so I learn.
Intelligence is the function of that skill in constructing and reconstructing ideas. Hmm. There are some aspects I’m missing, here.