Intelligence is?

Intelligence is the actions of things that continue to exist.
it is not the actions of things that don't exist.

A system will select between different options.
an option is the unit of selection.

a host is intelligent if it has a way to chose options that increase the hosts survival.


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From the perspective of a human
you can list the different systems that are good at hosting units of intelligence.

systems					units

1. DNA				 	genes
2. a Brain 				ideas
3. a culture			memes
4. a computer			code


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Lucky for us humans can benefit from each different type of intelligence.









rewrite below test to work with above.



















1. genes
The speed of genetic thought is determined by the lifespan of the species.
in humans that means that genes can "think" about once every 20 years.





2. Brain
The Brain is able to perform trial and error experiments much faster then DNA can
Depending on the human and the day, 
a human could perform a very large number of intelligent thoughts.
relative to evolution the human brain is many many times faster



3. Culture
The speed of Cultural thought is limited by
the rate at which communication occurs and the number of humans.
as the number of humans goes up and the rate of communication goes up with the internet
culture is thinking faster and faster.
still slower then a single human, but faster then DNA.

This process is analogous to evolution.

In terms of evolution, a meme is like a gene.
humans are host to both memes and genes
we transmit genes when we reproduce, we transmit memes as we communicate.


By culture I mean the ideas that flow between one human mind and another.
It may seem that culture as an intelligence does very little
compared to a human mind or biological evolution.
But culture does in fact learn skills and apply them.
The skills that culture learns are called memes.
memes are responsible for some of the differences between
groups of humans.



examples of memes are:
religion, "how to peal a banana", goth, fashion, existentialism, science


With the natural force of evolution acting on memes
some memes end up more adapted then others
these memes have an increased chance to survive and spread
often memes do better if they improve the host
but like viruses not all memes are helpful


examples of a poorly adapted memes are: alchemy 		(list more)
alchemy was like chemistry in many ways
the main difference between the chemistry and alchemy
is that alchemists wanted to keep any discoveries a secret
while chemists are encouraged to share both success and failures.
Thus alchemy did not spread fast nor did it improve the host


(go on to talk about western religions as memes and as intelligences)





4. computers
Due to the ability to specialize computers for pure information processing
computers have the greatest potential for speed and accuracy of intelligent thought.
Computers can be much faster then human thought, currently they have similar speeds.
speeds vary depending on specialization of the hardware.



in 2006 computers or "information technology" are acting primarily as a medium
to speed up the spread of memes through the internet.

Some actual intelligence is coming (and more in the future I assume)
from computers.

computer AI may benefit from coming up with
a process more analogous to evolution.

Example: scientific simulations speed up the trial and error process
that seems to be fundamental to intelligence.


























1. Humans use instict to guide us.

example: All humans dislike the smell of poo.
This clever knowledge about how poo sucks
is not based on your own experiance eating poo
or based on information from others.
It comes from your DNA.


2. Based on past experiance and a model of our world humans think.
This process has two fundamental parts
1. Trial and error 
2. combination of ideas to make new ones.

Example: quantum mechanics.
With no human instinct or experiance
to guide the discovery of quantum mechanics
Humans were still able to create a model
of the quantum mechanical world
and use that model to solve problems.


3. Humans use information given to us from others.

Example: pealing bananas
In some countries humans peal bananas stem first.
In some countries humans peal bananas tip first.
Most people in America are not even aware that there
is another way to peal bananas
showing that for most the solution to
pealing a banana comes from others
not instict or a thinking mind.