Svatman

What truly is intelligence?

I just realised something.

Till now I was looking for the best definition of intelligence. Some saw intelligence as finding the best or the fastest solution in a particular situation.

But it was not sitting well with me, given a lot of people who were not good at finding something in given time boundaries.

And no original idea/theory has come out of time limited settings (take Einstein, Socrates, Darwin etc).

So I was confused what really is intelligence?

Is it finding the best available solution in the fastest way possible?

Or is it the best solution with no time boundaries?

If there’s no time boundaries then we won’t know who really is intelligent.

So what really is intelligence?

What I realised just now is that “Intelligence is the capacity to be self aware.”

The more a person is intelligent the more self aware he will be (as he is more capable).

The more self aware a person is the more self aware he will be about the surroundings, the universe (therefore will be able to find anomalies and hence its possible solutions; or even the discovery of anomalies is itself one of the greatest achievements).

A self aware person is less likely to get fixated on finding the best available solution, instead he will understand that in a lot of situations we have not yet devised any solution and it may take time, maybe forever in some cases.