Genius, a Conjecture
2023 Year of Song and Verse Vol.8
For Trishank
If you don’t have friends you disagree with you are boring or they are boring.
~ Me
I have been struggling with the idea that intelligence is just computation and the difference is speed of computation and access to the information needed for the computation.
Cormac McCarthy’s last two novels are about two Genius not the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hour Genius (there is no genius without practice but not all practice leads to genius), or I got a 150 IQ and am in Mensa kind, but the Genius that devours and generates ideas. Genius has a computational piece and it is very necessary processing faster actually saves time and lets one get through to a final conceptualization efficiently. The ability of the initial seed of an idea, an almost muse like nature of ideas seems to be something in addition to fast computation. This is what I think is missing from the computational speed as the ultimate leveler.
As we deal with AI I find AI is very fast at computational regurgitation and imitation but this is not intelligence or genius. I have seen people trained to do things by rote and by creative methods. The rote learns struggle often with the creative process and love repetitive and even complicated work. I know and work with genius engineers and musicians, and the rote or computational speed is there but there is also the idea generation piece that is a unique and not formulaic, thoughts that are out of the original computation that are beyond initial boundaries of the problem arise in a certain set of people. This idea of generation is outside the computational speed.
I have a pretty fast conceptual clock I would say I am probably 80–85 percentile if I had to guess. Arriving first at ideas that are only on how fast you think will differentiate you from others. I can recognize the 20 % who are faster than me they come off as smarter. But true genius to me is more of generating things of originality.
McCarthy’s last novel is written by a genius about genius, I see flaws in The Passenger and Stela Maris like he isn’t a great mathematician or physicist and he hand waives a lot. He has writing formulae that are as old as No Country for Old Men and a theme of a erudite and thoughtful person struggling with absurdity of their own personal life. Yet he takes characters in the abstract that were potentially bland and unoriginal and breaths life into them, I want to meet both Alicia and Bobby Western. It is in the generation of the unique story that he can examine absurdity, the desire or lack of desire for life, genius and use and waste of potential with humanity and make you desire to understand characters that may be less than sympathic from another author.
I take piano lessons from a genius. She is in that 99.9 computational speed cohort, she can site read almost anything she can sit in on almost any piece when someone is missing, but how and why and what she decides to play is more important than her raw ability. I saw two world class player play the 32 nd piano Sonata by Beethoven. Both were again in the upper cadre of speed talent and technique. They played flawlessly but Maria Joao Pires performance was everything while the concert we saw of the same piece left everyone bored and uninspired earlier in the season. It was not a question of talent or computational speed but of bringing something new and generative.
Trishank this is a pure conjecture I have no way to test this, and I want your thoughts. I am not saying genius or having generative talents makes for an uber-mench scenario for genius can be dangerous as McCarthy novel points out on the atomic bomb, and the men who made it. Also I think the mentality that human is a class of great equality and that we should not think ourselves to superiors is the proper stance for the wise and yet often neglected by the merely intelligent.
