Re: Becoming more intelligent
Intelligence is a habit. I believe it has a lot to do with how you think, not what you think, which is why it appears in so many different forms. People who develop lazy thinking habits end up developing lazy thoughts.
Active vs. lazy thinking:
In the context that I say intelligence is a habit, predicated upon lazy vs. active thinking, there's a lot of facets to consider. People can be active thinkers and seekers of new information in specific areas - Chess, Mathematics, Linguistics etc.
They can also be broadly intelligent - able to consider many mutually opposing concepts and to identify the correct one(s) through both deductive and inductive reasoning.
This is hard for me to formulate into words concisely...I don't really feel like writing an entire essay on the concept of lazy and active thinking habits and how they contribute to the development of, 'intelligence'.
So I'll use an example, and hopefully you can take from the example the underlying premise I'm trying to highlight and see the pattern I'm attempting to express. Just to note, I'm not accusing you of lazy thinking in this.
Example follows on from this quote:
You actually had an increase in IQ? Impressive. I know that knowledge is connections between neurons, but knowledge =/= intelligence. Are you saying that by acquiring more knowledge you subsequently became more intelligent? I guess it makes sense, the more you engage your brain, the better you become at using it. I'm interested in both psychology and philosophy but not sure which books to start out with, what would you suggest?
I don't think you need to really read books about things to become more intelligent (what is intelligence anyway, this is hard to discuss without knowing what the definition you're judging it by is supposed to be...). I'm always wary of books, because they're full of opinions. A lot of the time books don't seem to make people smarter, just better at regurgitating the information within the books.
Philosophy is individual to everyone, and reading lengthy materials on the matter is (mostly) missing the point of philosophy in the first place.
I'm not against books, I just think that there's a key difference between studying underlying concepts of a book as opposed to simply assimilating droves of information and opinions contained within.
Essentially, how you read (actively) is more important than what you read (lazy) in developing intelligence. Though again, there's exceptions to this rule...obviously if you want to learn chemistry you wouldn't read a story about Spot the Dog (well, maybe you would).
What I'm trying to highlight is that intelligence is fluid and ever-changing. You aren't set at a certain level of intellect, and you don't possess the same intellect across all contexts. So it's important to develop the habit of being intellectual, if you want to become intelligence.
To me, intelligence is largely contextual. People who can identify and adapt to many different contexts are the sort of people I see as most intelligent, because they don't just have the ability to assimilate information - they have developed the habit of being intelligent and thinking with originality. Concepts are approached without predisposition to one conclusion or another, and they are able to think, discuss and problem solve anything - they can root out and identify the important points of any given situation and understand its relevance both to the given context, and the importance of that context within the whole.
