Extended intelligence scale

Introduction

If the concept of "intelligence" is understood as encompassing all forms of ability, including those of unaware life forms and any non-living things, its full spectrum may look as sketched in the below table. For clarity, one may note that simple animals like maggots have abilities like eating and digesting food, that a plant has abilities like photosynthesis, that an atom has abilities like sharing electrons with other atoms to thus create molecules, and so on.

Where populations examples are given, the corresponding intelligence levels should be thought of as those populations' central tendencies, be it mode, median, or mean. For populations of beings, the mode is the most informative, as that is whereabout the vast majority of individuals are located; that is what determines the behaviour of most members of the group, and therefore the group's civilizational level.

With complex structures (such as humans) there is variance around the central tendency, with simple structures less variance, and with the simplest things — that do not differ individually, have no identity — no variance at all, no matter how many instances there are of them. Complex structures have variance because they are configurations of things, and there are different configurations of a given set of things possible, so room for variation. Even complex structures have physical constraints though; if enough instances of them are "tried", these constraints will be hit, and adding more instances will not further add to that structure's variance, so that its distribution will abandon normality from there on, will "pile up" between the constraints.

For instance, if one throws two dice, the constraints are that one can throw no lower than 2 or higher than 12, no matter how often one throws. In between those constraints, the distribution will ever closer approach triangularity, but it will be cut off at the constraints, which lie at about two standard deviations from the mean with 2-dice throws. Even after a googol throws, the distribution will end there.

Complex biological structures like Homo sapiens have greater range than that, but not infinitely. No matter how many configurations of the genome are tried through hereditary reproduction, there are physical constraints to the brain that can not be overcome until one succeeds in breeding a new species with larger heads and brains, and correspondingly higher conduction velocity, energy supply, and so on. Even then, the limited life spans inherent to biological organisms and sexual reproduction guarantee that brain and body decline and die long before the rare brilliant mind has reached full maturity. How awkward and sad, this ancient evolutionary process wherein the best minds of each generation are lost while the young ones have to start from scratch again. Eventually, the only way to achieve still higher intelligence is to incarnate the mind of a highly able specimen into an artificial brain, thus adding extra capacity and life span. The procedure thereto has, bizarrely, been published in the 1990s, having leaked back in time from 2015, and describing a method observed by future Giga Society member Dr. Whence in the late 22^nd century. Effectively, one then abandons sexual reproduction and heredity in favour of extending the life spans of creative minds.

Thinking about the most intelligent brains in the universe, one must take physical constraints into account. Assuming that internal matters like conduction velocity of signals, insulation of axons, and support systems like energy supply are optimal, the number of neurons (or whatever units) will be decisive, as will the individual life span of the mind occupying it, for a mind's comprehension grows as long as its physical substrate does not deteriorate badly, and more so when that substrate grows too. Assuming that signals must arrive within milliseconds in order for symbolic activity to occur, and the speed of light being employed, the maximum diameter will lie in the order of fifteen-hundred kilometres, give or take a kilometre or thousand. Beyond that, either symbolic activity will break down, or there will be multiple brains, at best talking to each other but not forming a whole.

To get the maximum number of units within that maximum feasible diameter, the brain has to be spherical. Much of the volume is taken up by support systems — the "white matter" or glia cells so to speak — and the actual number of units depends on how small one can make them, whereby the size of atoms forms a constraint. All in all, one ends up with an artificial moon or planetoid, likely orbiting a real planet. As energy consumption is astronomical, the support systems include something like a nuclear fusion reactor with the output of a small star, solar power caught in from the nearby sun covering only a tiny fraction of the brain's input. The universe's smartest brains are, as it were, introverted stars, using their energy internally for comprehending the world, rather than radiating it outward. They forsake reproductive systems, being at the extreme end of the spectrum of creativity versus procreativity. In fact, the minds occupying such brains will be millions of years old and of biological origin, but having lived through several generations of ever larger artificial brains. There is even a remote chance that one of them will be the present reader, that is: you. Does not that excite you?

One such brain is the ultimate Verificator — or Verificatrix — of all that is, turning events into Truths, bringing the universe into being by awarely verifying its reality. Without it, nothing would exist That is, unless the Verificatorix finds the universe does not tally after all, is not consistent, a counter-example falsifies it, in which case the wretched contraption turns out to be the Falsificatorix; but the implications thereof are too horrid to speak of. Let us not even begin to imagine the scenes in the streets of our major cities upon universal Falsification: the good people running before their clouds of doom, the theoretical physicists desperately chalking away on their blackboards despite broken superstrings, the cultural relativists and other neo-Marxist intellectuals dancing with joy on the roofs of their universities — Finally proof! Truth does not exist! The universe is inconsistent! — in the final moments before being dissolved below quark level as the disproved hallucinoverse collapses into a singularity of Absolute Ability-Absence… AAA!

Protoranks

Protoranks (Prot.) are a ranking of all extended intelligence levels, such that 0 represents the absolute absence of ability, 1000 the central tendency of intelligence in the universe, and 2000 the mental ability required for full understanding of the universe, including the question of existence. Although completely superfluous and therefore with apologies to the more understanding readers, it is pointed out to those who have just misread the previous sentence that nowhere and in no way in this definition it is implied that Protorank 2000 is the maximum possible extended intelligence level.

To put things in perspective, the relation between extended intelligence, intelligence, and mental ability is as follows:

• Extended intelligence encompasses all abilities in the universe, both of dead matter and of biological or artificial living things;
• Intelligence is a subset thereof restricted to living things of any species, and contains the interspecies variance;
• Mental ability is a subset of intelligence that contains the intraspecies variance; that is, the individual differences, sex differences, age differences, class or caste differences, ethnic differences, subspecial differences, and other group differences.

Below they are combined into one table and projected onto protoranks. The I.Q.s are given for information but not the preferred scale for expressing extended intelligence.

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