Quotes About Intelligence

A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs.

The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice—or not yet—a decided one.

A deist, too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs.

Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error.

But we exist now. We are caring, intelligent animals and can treasure our brief lives. Why is eternal better than temporal, or supernatural higher than natural? Doesn't rarity increase value? God is an idea, not a natural creature. Why should his image be more valuable than our own nature?

Ä°ÅŸte bu gerçek, yani ak?ll? tasar?m?n kendisine ait bir kan?t?n?n olmamas? ve kendi kan?t? yerine bilimsel bilginin b?rakt??? boÅŸluklarda bir yabani ot gibi geliÅŸmesi, bilim bir boÅŸluk bulduÄŸunda bunun araÅŸt?r?lmas? için çaÄŸr? yapma ihtiyac? aç?s?ndan s?k?nt? yaratan bir ÅŸeydir.

All life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

Could it have been the drawing of maps that boosted our ancestors beyond the critical threshold which the other apes just failed to cross?

Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren't smart.

I like writing that's smart on the page.

I remember the revelation it was to me when I realized I'd rather be smart in the way Elvis Presley was than in the way, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein was. The thing was, you could imagine you could be smart like Wittgenstein by just thinking hard enough, but Elvis just had it. It was almost spiritual. A kind of grace.

Most Americans think that crime has gotten far too high. But in the ruminations about how the nation has reached this state and what might be done, too little attention has been given to one of the best-documented relationships in the study of crime: As a group, criminals are below average in intelligence.

How large is the black-white difference? The usual answer to this question is one standard deviation. In discussing IQ tests, for example, the black mean is commonly given as 85, the white mean as 100, and the standard deviation as 15.

Cognitive sorting continues from the time that students enter college to the time they get a degree

Three generations of imbeciles are enough," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared in an opinion upholding the constitutionality of such a law.

The causes of human deficiencies in intelligence—or parenting, or social behavior, or work behavior—lay outside the individual. They were caused by flaws in society.

The contrary notion—that individual differences could not easily be diminished by government intervention—collided head-on with the enthusiasm for egalitarianism, which itself collided head-on with a half-century of IQ data indicating that differences in intelligence are intractable and significantly heritable

The authors] have been cast as racists and elitists and The Bell Curve has been dismissed as pseudoscience . . . . The book's message cannot be dismissed so easily.

Over the course of a few generations, the average intelligence in an aristocratic family fell toward the population average, hastened by marriages that matched bride and groom by lineage, not ability.

A true cognitive elite requires a technological society.

But school is in itself, more immediately and directly than any other institution, the place where people of high cognitive ability excel and people of low cognitive ability fail.

The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate functions: artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazard-proof bodywork, which most cyberengineering firms designed to spec for the task at hand.

Any synthetic intelligence can be independent only within the boundaries of the U.N. regulatory charter. The charter is hardwired into my systems, so in effect I have as much to fear from the police as a human does.

To believe in God or in a guiding force because someone tells you to is the height of stupidity. We are given senses to receive our information with. With our own eyes we see, and with our skin we feel. With our intelligence, it is intended that we understand. But each person must puzzle it out for himself or herself. SOPHY BURNHAM