A key algorithm for general intelligence is a compensation mechanism for category error. This is because anything that learns must recognize that their habitual models of thought can be in error.
Planck remarked that science makes progress one funeral at a time. The problem with the human condition is that we are so devoted to the personal habits we invented for ourselves that we have difficulty letting them go.
Even more difficult, we embed in our language habits of thought. We are unable to break out of this jail because we cannot express new things with an old vocabulary.
Thus to make progress we develop new vocabularies. Unfortunately, new vocabularies cannot be understood by other people who did not go through the experience of deriving the new concept for themselves.
Pioneers are those people who are able to expand into new territories. They learn by exploring and uncovering hidden ideas. In contrast, the settlers are people who learn only by imitation. Most people are settlers.
People are settlers because it's always more comfortable to fall back on your old habits. Furthermore, civilization indoctrinates people to become settlers. The machinery of civilization requires many to sacrifice their lives to be cogs in the great machine.
We are so entrenched in the machine metaphor of civilization that we are unable to recognize the difference between narrow and general intelligence. What we usually see as intelligence is of the narrow kind. We fail to notice the general kind.
Intelligence becomes narrow as a consequence of habit. Habit are behaviors that we perform subconsciously and automatically. The problem with all conscious thought is that they are also a consequence of habit. Thus to see error we have to cultivate a different kind of habit.
The practice of science leads to the breaking of habit. It is through experimentation that we gain insight into how reality works. Reality is sufficiently complex that we need complex interactions with reality to uncover its inner workings.
We do not discover how reality works by reasoning based on old habits. Experimental discoveries are what leads to new habits that lead to new vocabularies and hence new hypotheses about reality.
Mathematics is that peculiar field that we discover new vocabularies that are independent of reality. Math provides vocabularies that can express all kinds of realities that include alternative realities.
It is the combination of new vocabularies influenced by experiential discoveries and vocabularies discovered in math that lead to new formulations of reality. Recently, however, computational discoveries are also creating new vocabularies. Experimentation, math and computation.
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