By Howard Gardner
Act 1: Intelligence as a Lay Term and Concept
In many societies, and for a good many years, there has been a concept—and typically a word—like “intelligence.” It’s a lay term, and, accordingly, it has had different connotations. As an example, in Latin American countries, the capacity to listen carefully (and quietly) is often considered a marker of intelligence; in England, the capacity to speak or respond rapidly and wittily is valued. Sometimes, “intelligence” has in effect been assessed by society-mandated tests, such as the French “Bac,” the English “O” and “A” levels, or the Chinese imperial examination (these days, the “Gaokao”).
Act 2: Intelligence as Probed by a Single Instrument
With the rise of psychology and other human sciences, the desire to measure intelligence came onto the scene. Without question, the creation of the IQ test at the beginning of the 20th century was a milestone in any consideration of matters of intelligence. Alfred Binet (French), Cyril Burt (British), Lewis Terman (American), and their students, were honored for creating short instruments with high reliability which promised (or purported) to predict success in school (and presumably thereafter).
Act 3: The Identification of Multiple Intelligences
While the IQ test has retained prominence in many educational, vocational, and medical settings, the limits to a “single” or “singular” notion of intelligence were soon apparent. Journalist, Walter Lippmann, wrote about these limitations a century ago—noting that individuals could have different kinds of intellectual strengths and could develop them in different ways—see this article. Test maker, David Wechsler, emphasized the importance (and distinctiveness) of social intelligence, noting that it was not tapped by standard IQ measures.
Forty years ago, drawing on evidence from a variety of scholarly disciplines (including genetics, neurology, and anthropology), I proposed the theory of multiple intelligences (soon abbreviated to “MI theory”). The core idea: Rather than the mind containing a single all-purpose computer, the human mind is better described as a set of relatively independent computers. In addition to the linguistic and logical-mathematical computers probed by standard IQ tests, there exist several other intelligences, including musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist.
In identifying intelligences, I drew on an explicit set of criteria. Others have added to the list of intelligences, most prominently, Daniel Goleman with his concept of emotional intelligence—in some ways akin to the ‘personal intelligences.” And scores of articles, books, and tests claim to probe other candidates, ranging from financial, to humorous, to sexual intelligence.
Act 4: Intelligences Beyond the Human—but with Human intelligence as the Model
During the decades where intellect has come to be seen in pluralistic terms, the construct of intelligence has also been examined in many places and with respect to numerous species. There are convincing studies of the intelligence(s) of primates, mammals, insects, birds. (These are elegantly described in a new book by Ed Yong and in a just-published article in The New York Times.) And of course, with the advent of powerful computational approaches, we now have artificial intelligence, as realized in computers, deep learning algorithms, robots with notable problem-solving capacities, and the like.
Act 5: Intelligence(s) Everywhere
In a fascinating new book, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence, science writer and polymath James Bridle puts forth and defends a provocative hypothesis.
While recognizing that other authorities have attributed intelligence to baboons and bees, Bridle wants to extend intelligence to all matters of life, including trees and other plants. (For a passionate argument for the intelligence of trees, see Richard Powers’ award winning novel, The Overstory.) Going beyond living entities, Bridle searches for intelligence across the natural world—perhaps intelligence can be found in mountains and oceans. In addition, of course, he acknowledges that many computational devices qualify for the descriptor of “intelligence.”
Bridle then makes an important move. He claims that underlying the way that most of us use the term “intelligence,” we are at least implicitly attributing intelligence in an ego-centric or human-centric way. We attribute ‘intelligence” to entities on the basis of the extent to which these entities embody the intellectual capacities that we as humans respect and valorize.
On Bridle’s account, this is wrong—the intellect of homo sapiens should not be the measure of all things. Instead, we should value the full swathe of entities on our planet, and what they accomplish, over vast periods of time; learn and profit from their intellectual strengths; and make common cause with them for the survival of the planet, including all of its species, be they animals or plants, gigantic or microscopic. And, though he is less decisive about this, he also cites what we can learn from natural phenomena, like oceans and mountains, and from man-made tools, ranging from wrenches to computer programs to robots.
Rather than paraphrase him further, let me quote some passages from the opening section of his book:
One way to change the nature of these relationships then, is to change the way which we think about intelligences: What it is, how it acts in the world, and who possesses it…
Until very recently, humankind was understood to be the sole possessor of intelligence… we are just starting to open the door to an understanding of an entirely different form of intelligence; indeed, of many different intelligences…. From bonobos shaping complex tools, jackdaws training us to forage for them, bees debating the direction of their swarms, or trees that talk to and nourish one another—or something far greater and more ineffable than these mere parlor tricks—the nonhman world seems suddenly alive with intelligence and agency… Western science and popular imagination, after centuries of inattention and denial, are only starting to take them seriously… What would it mean to build artificial intelligences and other machines that were more like octopuses, more like fungi, or more like forests? What would it mean for us—to live among them? And how would doing so bring us closer to the natural world, to the earth from which our technology has sundered, and indeed sundered us from? We must find ways to reconcile our technological prowess and sense of human uniqueness with an earthy sensibility and an attentiveness to the interconnected of all things. We must learn to live with the world, rather than seek to dominate it.
…the most powerful of these is the idea that human intelligence is unique, and uniquely significant in the world. Yet as we shall see there are in fact many ways of doing intelligence, because intelligence is an active process, not just a mental capacity.
We are poisoning the world—If we do not wish to render ourselves alone and abject on the face of the earth, we must rethink every aspect of our technological society and the ideas it is founded on and we must do it fast. (pp. 10-12)
This is quite a lot to absorb! It requires us to rethink assumptions that we (as members of homo sapiens) have been making—consciously or unconsciously—as long as we have had and used a concept of intelligence.
I applaud Bridle for thinking so daringly outside of the box. His book certainly shook up my categorical schemes, if not my categorical imperative.
But I am left with two big questions:
If we declare everything and every entity as intelligent, then what have we actually gained? Don’t we need criteria for what counts as intelligence, and what does not; what is smart, what is stupid, what is indeterminable at the moment, and, perhaps forever? To what should we attend, what should we ignore, try to preserve, seek to change, and on what grounds? And is survival the best—or perhaps the only—litmus test for intelligence?
Intelligence is not necessarily good, positive, moral, ethical. Individuals with hi IQs, however measured, have done wonderful things; but they also have done horrible things. And groups of individuals with high IQs have also been pro-social or anti-social. So, too, for individuals who exhibit high interpersonal or high bodily-kinesthetic intelligence.
Just as we need lines and boundaries for intelligence—we can’t just assume that everything is intelligent—we need lines and boundaries for what is good, for us, for other species and entities, for the planet, and indeed for the universe and all time…and what is not.
Bridle has opened up our minds—but he has also opened up a Pandora’s box.
References
Bridle, J. (2022). Ways of being: Animals, Plants, Machines, and the Search for a Planetary Intelligence. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Anthes, E. (2022). The Animal Translators. The New York Times. Retrieved 1 September 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/science/translators-animals-naked-mole-rats.html.
Powers, R. (2017). The Overstory: A Novel. Norton.
Yong, E. (2022). An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal The Hidden Realms Around Us. Random House.
I thank Shinri Furuzawa and Ellen Winner for their comments on a draft of this essay.
Photo by Margot RICHARD on Unsplash