The distinction made between the different knowledge forms has been very useful. Thank you.
The functional intelligence you described here I find very interesting. Do you mean that it is not likely that people can become more functional intelligence because probably a large part of it is based on the heritage of certain genes?
spinoza wrote for example about intelligence/ insight: “People only know themselves [and things] by means of the disorders of their body and the ideas of it. And this insight is “larger” when there is more ability to distinct between the various disorders”.
In a way, being busy with philosophy, people learn about themselves and maybe even the ability to distinct is streched…then my question is:
If we agree on a certain presence of intelligence, and that it is an ability to acquire insight, could we say that philosophy makes people more intelligent ?
I certainly believe that intelligence is largely determined by genes, both potential and functional intelligence. People can become more intelligent, what I mean by functional intelligence, is current level of intelligence. Potential intelligence is, how intelligent a person could be, and that limit is largely determined by genetics.
That depends, if philosophical ideas of sorts increased what you found obvious, as in, what was obvious to you, and increased your ability to make those connections in other areas of life, sure. For example, someone can learn a lot of stuff about science, physics and so forth and so on, and find much more to be obvious, which requires some form of intelligence.
For example a scientist who from watching a building fall can tell you how it happened step by step and identify what caused the disaster and why the building failed and so forth and so on. For the scientist to be abe to deduce all this as obvious (or at least aspects of it) requires a functional intelligence, not only specific knowledge, but how that knowledge interacts on a real-time scale in the real world.
So theres an instance of education making someone functionally more intelligent. They could deduce connections which were never specifically taught to them through educationto learn new things/see other things as obvious when they weren’t before.
IF certain forms of philosophy can do this (and philosophy includes science, its just a general term to mean pretty much any thought) then sure.
Or an even better example would be the science of biases and heuristics, which examine certain modes of thought meant for economical response, theres dozens and dozens of them, which routinely jarr human judgement.
Say, learning about them could easily make a person more intelligent because they’d be self-aware of the types of errors which are common to human reasoning/judgement. theres a huge list of them in another thread, which effect the objectivity of observations, predictions, statements and so on and so forth. (i’m sure that could loosely be labeled philosophy).
theres plenty of philosophy which makes people functionally less intelligent too.
In my own thinking i find “intelligence” to simply be a level of awareness which has no level. An imagination (or thinking basically) gives the ability to examine which gives way to a personal and only personal common sense. Imagination possibly gives the illusion of having pre knowledge of everything. I think saying that “intelligence doesn’t exist” is appropriate because…i had a grasp of why but i just lost it. Have to think about it.