The Essence of Intelligence

I believe that one major problem of the neuroscience community is the lack of an overlying theory that is capable of making sense of the brain. It's obvious that our brain in incredibly complicated, and it is the basis for intelligence. I think that understanding intelligence is essential to understanding the complexities of the brain, what its function in, and why it operates in the manor it does.

I've talked to a lot of people who believe that intelligence is relative, and that depending on the way you measure it, people are more or less intelligent. This does not make any sense and it stems from the fact that I do not think that we have clearly defined what intelligence is and how to measure it. This is illustrated in the study of artificial intelligence, where researchers essentially try to make computers "smart." They have succeeded at making their machine better at the assigned task, but we have yet to see a machine that would be classified as intelligent. A uniting theory is essential to advancing technology and our current understanding of the brain.

I have been thinking about this problem, and I believe that there are four requirements to intelligent beings - whether living or non-living.

1. Necessity to survive, driven by a need to reproduce (I could foresee non biological intelligent beings not having a need to reproduce).
2. Ability to receive consistent inputs from the environment automatically (ie - have sensory systems)
3. Ability to store information
4. Ability to use stored information to predict future outcomes. In other words, the ability to recognize patterns in the past knowledge and be able to analyze current input information for these similar patterns.

Pattern recognition is really the basis for all intelligence. The better someone is at recognizing patterns from all of their sensory inputs, the better they will be at predicting future outcomes when they recognize similar patterns in their current environment. The need for survival is creates a drive to interact in the world and a drive to become the most adapted to your environment. This can only happen by getting "smarter." The necessity for sensory input arises because knowledge of ones environment is essential to being otherwise the being will have no basis of information for which they can detect patterns and no way applying these patterns to the current environmental situation (because they can't tell what the current environment really is).

Essentially intelligence stems from your interaction with the environment, and beings that have no way to receive sensory input - whether tactile or sensory - cannot be intelligent. You can clearly trace the rise of intelligence through the phyla as organisms gain better sensory systems and adaptation techniques.