Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

 

What do we talk about when we talk about INTELLIGENCE? In 2024/2025, SPACE invites Dawson students across the disciplines to grapple with this question and others related to our new annual theme.

There is no universally agreed upon scientific or philosophical definition of intelligence. Historically, intelligence is associated with human capabilities to grasp the basic concepts of time, space, beauty, reason, morality and causality. Yet if “intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive,” as Charles Darwin argued, then it must be a trait that belongs to the rest of the animal kingdom, plants and perhaps alien life forms as well. Indeed, evolutionary biologist David Krakauer posits that a proper framework of intelligence should allow us to talk about not only individual humans and non-humans but also collectives—for example, cultures, which give rise to inventions such as language, music, cuisine and crafts—and even smart machines or artificial intelligences.^[1]

One can look at a vast range of ideas, works, abilities and systems—e.g. general relativity, classical mechanics, the imaginary number, the collected works of Shakespeare, the electric car, the guitar playing of Jimi Hendrix, the hockey skills of Hayley Wickenheiser, the structure of a company, government or society, to name just a few examples—and examine the various dimensions of intelligence at work. In this way, discussions about intelligence can extend far beyond traditional notions—for instance, intelligence associated with academic performance—to a much more comprehensive view, encompassing what American developmental psychologist and Harvard professor Howard Gardner called “multiple intelligences”.^[2] One can even look at, say, a coronavirus—an organism “with less than twenty genes, that by any definition of I.Q. would be one of the most ignorant things on the planet”—and recognize that, at least when it comes to finding ways to spread replicas of itself, it seems to be pretty smart.^[3]

In human beings, the idea of multiple intelligences implies that intelligence manifests itself in different ways through different kinds of activities, whether theoretical (e.g. science, philosophy, humanities, math, logic), practical (e.g. experimentation, constructing, making), aesthetic or normative (e.g. art, music, painting, narration, poetry, film), moral (determining the rightness of certain acts as well as which things are good in themselves), entertaining (e.g. sports, games, leisure), existential (e.g. interpersonal, intrapersonal, social) or others. Specific cases of one or more of these activities may inspire reflections on what kinds and facets of intelligence express themselves when we try to successfully accomplish these activities. 

Recently, with the exponential advancements in artificial intelligence, we have been confronted by the question asked by American scholar Jensen Suther: “[h]ave we finally built a machine that can think?” In Suther’s words, “[the] sudden leap in AI capability has reinvigorated the debate about whether machines can emulate human intelligence, with many believing that deep learning neural networks will eventually match, if not surpass altogether, our kind of mind.”^[4] But the answer to that question will depend, in part, on our definition of intelligence. For instance, in the opinion of New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein, many “generative” AI systems are mis-named, because generative “usually means it helps you get somewhere new. But these systems are mimics; they help you go somewhere old. They can help us write or draw or compose like anyone else, but [it is] much harder when using them to become more like yourself.”^[5] For Klein, the lack of originality in much of what AI currently produces suggests that something important is lacking in its intelligence.

 

Analyzing intelligence may also involve identifying different types and examples of its opposite: ignorance. In human beings, ignorance may take the form of cognitive biases and mental heuristics (i.e. shortcuts) that may help us in some circumstances but fail us in others, such as when we struggle to think long-term, to escape tribal thinking or to ignore social media because of our hardwired interest in any form of social information. It may also take the form of what the 15^th century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa termed “learned ignorance”—both in the negative sense of pseudo-knowledge or faux intelligence, and in the positive sense of knowledge of one’s own ignorance, or, as Socrates famously said, the knowledge “that I know nothing.”

 

SPACE offers a wide selection of activities, resources and venues, including through the SPACE: Arts and Sciences certificate, for students in all fields of study to explore and share their discoveries around INTELLIGENCE—what it is, how it works, what varieties of it exist, how it manifests, and where it gives way to ignorance, requiring both intellectual rigor and humility on our part. We look forward to thinking about intelligence with you this year!

Above: detail of poster design by Alexa Giroux, Illustration student, Dawson College.

If you wish to get involved with SPACE, please contact the SPACE coordinator:                                                                                            

Joel Trudeau—SPACE Coordinator, Fall; SPACE Certificate Coordinator, Winter (Physics)
Andrew Katz— SPACE Cordinator, Winter (English)