Após alguns meses de meditação e/ou indefinição e/ou hesitação, estou voltando. Como dizia o Chico Buarque naquela música,

Pode ir armando o coreto e preparando aquele feijão preto
Eu tô voltando...
Põe meia dúzia de Brahma pra gelar, muda a roupa de cama
Eu tô voltando...
Leva o chinelo pra sala de jantar
Que é lá mesmo que a mala eu vou largaaaaaaaar...

Eu tô voltando...
Só que agora em inglês.

Invited by my teacher, Ester Rodrigues, to write about intelligence, I would like to make some personal observations. First of all, I want to stress that the term “intelligence” is not much used in neuroscience, maybe because neuroscience, also called cognitive science, struggles to explain the workings of the human brain, and intelligence is neither a product nor a particular function of the brain. Rather, it’s a psychological index of the brain’s capacity. In other words: neuroscience studies how the brain works, while psychology analyses its fitness.
Psychology loves intelligence. I’m not underestimating it. Psychology is an important area of human culture, only it values too much a typical feature of the human being: the impulse to classify people. Classification is an essential aspect of socialization, but it is also the basis of hierarchization and, consequently, of preconception. Just as you classify people as beautiful and ugly, so too you classify them as smart and stupid. Let’s make it clear: people are really beautiful, and ugly, and smart, and stupid. Classification is a normal part of human social life and its moral aspects deserve considerations that transcend the limits of these comments.
Let’s try a new approach. All people are intelligent. What does happen is that some people are more intelligent than others. Leaving aside Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences and the most recently developed concept of emotional intelligence (Daniel Goleman), I’d rather focus on the concept of “general problem solver”, introduced by Herbert Simon in the field of artificial intelligence and subsequently absorbed by the cognitive sciences. It was Edgar Morin, a French philosopher, who has made the best use of that concept, applying it to the animal brain and, by extension, to the human one, whom he has called “problems solver machine”.
From cradle the human being has to solve problems: how to survive, how to socialize, how to reproduce, how to raise a family, how to prepare for death. While alive, that is to say, while solving problems, he’s intelligent. More or less intelligent, but always intelligent. Intelligence is an intrinsic feature of the brain, that is, the brain is intelligent because it’s brain. It’s a machine and intelligence is its manner of functioning.
On the other hand, the brain is not a privileged spot of intelligence. It’s more like a kind of concentrate of intelligence, product of the process of natural selection. As a matter of fact, intelligence exists without brain. Plants are a good example. Although plants don’t have brain, they can solve problems concerning survival, their location in relation to the sun for instance. Their movements are undoubtedly very slow, but they have a goal, an understandable goal, a rational goal. They are intelligent.
So we can conclude that all living beings are intelligent. Would be there, then, intelligence an emergent quality of the living stuff? I don’t think so. The living intelligence is only a complexification of a natural process that constitutes the universe. The difference between crystallization of minerals and human thoughts is a matter of grade, that is, it depends on the number of operations necessary to produce them, working basically on the same matter. In other words, crystals and thoughts grow from the same ground. Although it’s a natural phenomenon, it’s so stunning that some people assume it’s altogether divine. But that’s another matter.