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If you're good at finding the one right answer to life's multiple-choice
questions, you're "smart." But "intelligence" is what you
need when contemplating the leftovers in the refrigerator, trying to figure out
what might go with them; or if you're trying to speak a sentence that you've never
spoken before. As Jean Piaget used to say, intelligence is what you use when you
don't know what to do, when all the standard answers are inadequate. Evolving
something new "on the fly" involves a great deal of creative trial-and-error
inside the brain, mostly in the last second before speaking aloud. Starting from
themes as disjointed and unrealistic as those of a dream, you make something of
quality out of the subconscious morass. How? This book
tries to fathom how our inner life evolves from one second to the next, as we
steer ourselves from one topic to another, as we create and reject alternatives.
It's not just a little person inside the head doing all this, though it's natural
to assume that anything fancy requires an even fancier designer. Ever since Darwin,
however, we've known that elegant things can also emerge (indeed, self-organize)
from "simpler" beginnings. And, says theoretical
neurophysiologist William H. Calvin, the bootstrapping of new ideas works much
like the immune response or the evolution of a new animal species -- except that
the brain can turn the Darwinian crank a lot faster, on the time scale of thought
and action. Few proposals achieve a perfect ten when judged against our memories,
but we can subconsciously try out variations, using many brain regions. Eventually
as quality improves, we become conscious of our new invention. Drawing
on anthropology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, and the neurosciences, Calvin
also considers how a more intelligent brain developed using slow biological improvements
over the last few million years. Long ago, evolving jack-of-all-trades versatility
was encouraged by abrupt climate changes. Now, evolving intelligence uses a nonbiological
track: augmenting human intelligence and building intelligent machines. In his
concluding chapter, Calvin cautions about arms races in intelligence. Just as
the Red Queen explained to Alice in Wonderland, you might have to keep running
to stay in the same place. William H. Calvin is a
theoretical neurophysiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is
the author on nine books, including The Cerebral Code, The River That
Flows Uphill, and, with the neurosurgeon George A. Ojemann, Conversations
with Neil's Brain. |
