The general cognitive factor (g), measured by IQ tests, quantifies intelligence within the human range, but it does nothing to tell us what it is. Rather, a practical understanding of intelligence as problem-solving ability has to be assumed, in order to test it.
The idea of intelligence, more abstractly, applies far beyond IQ testing, to a wide variety of natural, technical, and institutional systems, from biology, through ecological and economic arrangements, to robotics. In each case, intelligence solves problems, by guiding behavior to produce local extropy. It is indicated by the avoidance of probable outcomes, which is equivalent to the construction of information. The idea of intelligence, more abstractly, applies far beyond IQ testing, to a wide variety of natural, technical, and institutional systems, from biology, through ecological and economic arrangements, to robotics. In each case, intelligence solves problems, by guiding behavior to produce local extropy. It is indicated by the avoidance of probable outcomes, which is equivalent to the construction of information.
The general science of extropy production (or entropy dissipation) is cybernetics. It follows, therefore, that intelligence always has a cybernetic infrastructure, consisting of adaptive feedback circuits that adjust motor control in response to signals extracted from the environment. Intelligence elaborates upon machinery that is intrinsically ‘realist’ , because it reports the actual outcome of behavior (rather than its intended outcome), in order to correct performance.
Even rudimentary, homeostatic feedback circuits have evolved. In other words, cybernetic machinery that seems merely to achieve the preservation of disequilibrium attests to a more general and complex cybernetic framework that has successfully enhanced disequilibrium. The basic cybernetic model, therefore, is not preservative, but productive.
Organizations of conservative (negative) feedback have themselves been produced as solutions to local thermodynamic problems, by intrinsically intelligent processes of sustained extropy increase, (positive) feedback assemblage, or escalation. In nature, where nothing is simply given (so that everything must be built), the existence of self-sustaining improbability is the index of a deeper runaway departure from probability. It is this cybernetic intensification that is intelligence, abstractly conceived.
Intelligence, as we know it, built itself through cybernetic intensification, within terrestrial biological history. It is naturally apprehended as an escalating trend, sustained for over 3,000,000,000 years, to the production of ever more extreme feedback sensitivity, extropic improbability, or operationally-relevant information. Intelligence increase enables adaptive responses of superior complexity and generality, in growing part because the augmentation of intelligence itself becomes a general purpose adaptive response.
Thus: