Well, I read your long article. I’m certainly interested in the subject, and I’ve written a lot about these themes (philosophy vs vulgar mass biases, etc.).

I think your treatment suffers from running together too many things, though, which results in a fuzzy notion of “intelligence.” I’d have liked to see your introduction be clearer about the differences between IQ, critical thinking skills (rules of logic), fallacies, cognitive biases, evolved/hardwired heuristics (rules of thumb, intuitions, snap judgments), emotions, and motivations (judgments of relevance and priority).

Another theme that’s relevant but that you don’t consider is Leo Strauss’s critique of modernity (the need for a double standard to account for the inevitable conflict between intellectual elites and the unenlightened herd, given the horrific contents of philosophical knowledge). Shadia Drury’s “The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss” is a provocative take that connects Strauss to postmodern cynicism.

The main issue I think your article’s unclear on is whether intelligence is supposed to be unmotivated. A computer that excels at calculating or that follows rules of logic might be “intelligent” in a narrow sense. Without programming that transmits certain human interests or motivations, the computer won’t care about anything, won’t have priorities, and won’t be able to judge what’s relevant to what. This leads to the infamous lack of commonsense in our rudimentary artificial intelligences. They can dominate in chess, but they lack the commonsense to realize that when it’s raining, it’s a good idea to bring an umbrella.

So are you saying we should reason like a perfectly objective, neutral, dispassionate computer? Thomas Nagel called something like this the view from nowhere, which leads to existential angst. Spinoza called it the God’s-eye view of the deterministic outcomes of nature’s unity. Buddhist detachment would also be relevant here. And I’ve argued that these conceptions tend to promote nihilism and amorality.

But David Hume argued that reason is the “slave of the passions.” This is in opposition to Plato’s view that reason should moderate the emotions. Modern psychology recognizes the importance of emotions in practical judgments. We evolved at least two forms of reasoning: algorithmic and holistic/heuristic, or strict logical, serial, slow deductions, and snap decisions based on rules of thumb. The latter intuitive leaps range over our background knowledge and they’re much harder to program into a computer.

So are emotions, intuitions, and character relevant to intelligence? Here’s where you waffle, and where your account ends up being incoherent. You say intelligence is opposed to stupidity or to prejudice. But are all emotions prejudicial or irrational in a prohibitive sense? We evolved to rely on intuitions and emotions to guide us, to make value judgments. The philosophical problems you consider are full of issues of value. Is strict logic or scientific explanation supposed to decide on what we should value? Then you’d have to contend with the naturalistic fallacy.

This comes to a head at the end of section five where you find yourself saying, “People who do not care…will never be intelligent.” You seem to blunder into that admission even though it undermines your distinction between intelligence and stupidity/prejudice.

Here we encounter another problem, raised by Weber and the Frankfurt School. The model of intelligence in the modern world is the scientific method. But is science unmotivated or free of prejudgments? Critics say no, science is implicitly about empowering humans to control natural processes by learning how they work. I’ve written a lot on this and highlighted the Promethean, Faustian, “Satanic” aspect of civilization and technoscience.

The point is that if even scientific reasoning isn’t free from bias—albeit from a species-wide, practically universal bias/interest/goal/creative vision, as opposed to a mere personal, idiosyncratic one—the rationalist distinction between intelligence and prejudice is empty and useless. The real question is what our biases should be, not whether we ought to have any at all. Which mental traits count as virtues and which as vices? What is our ethos, and is a transhuman ethos required to suit our zeitgeist after the death of God?

These are heady philosophical questions that are hardly settled by mere calculation or by unmotivated reasoning. Emotions are needed to decide on goals, values, and ideals. But not all emotions are equally relevant or noble. Character training is indeed a factor.

The underlying problem is that emotions and the rest of our subjectivity look arbitrary due to the objectivity of the world discovered and explained by scientific methods. This is the world’s disenchantment, as Weber said, which means there’s an existential leap of faith required even to trust that are values aren’t wholly absurd and futile. Modernity requires a new kind of faith to overcome the obsolescence of the old kind that grounded our values in theistic or theocratic presuppositions and traditions.

You suggest that intelligence goes together with freedom of thought, and this is indeed part of the modern liberal metanarrative. We eschew dogmas and prize individual liberties, especially the freedom to think for ourselves. But pure freedom is debilitating or counterproductive. The computer that’s free from emotional concerns can “think” about anything it wants, with nothing like politically correct fears or mammalian biases to interfere with its cogitations. But it won’t want to think. The machine’s memory and reasoning won’t be directed towards any end at all—unless the programmers add some direction or allow the computer to acquire a character in its process of learning its conceptual categories, the way children do.

So pure freedom isn’t what you’re looking for, which is a good thing because this kind of freedom would be supernatural and miraculous. We have some degree of autonomy, I believe, but nothing is absolutely free in the way the libertarian supposes, taking his conception of freedom over from Christianity which likewise undermines it with the Augustinian or Pauline notion of divine sovereignty. Only God would have this freedom, and this would be a miracle leading to all kinds of theological contradictions.

What we’re looking for, I think, is freedom from animalistic servitude, which is the purpose of civilizational pride. This is our Promethean, humanistic agenda, to build a human-centered world that replaces the monstrous, mindless, horrific, and absurd wilderness. Our artificial world would empower us, giving us greater self-control and freedom from nature. This leads to transhumanism.

I’m not a doctrinaire transhumanist, but this is what I observe happening in history. I observe this from a philosophical perspective—which likewise shouldn’t be equated with “intelligence.” Having a philosophical character isn’t the same as being intelligent. There are different kinds of intelligence, such as so-called left-brained versus right-brained kinds. Besides, there might be conservative intelligence in leaving philosophy up to a minority of foolhardy intellectual elites who sacrifice their capacity for happiness by delving deeply into dehumanizing knowledge.

You assume that maximizing genius would be good for humanity. But perhaps this would only dramatically increase the suicide rate. Obviously, it’s fear and other such “prejudices” that prevent everyone from thinking philosophically, from questioning their presuppositions at the risk of spoiling the delusions that make for happiness and social cohesion. But the question isn’t whether we should be rid of all such prejudices. Again, the questions are which prejudices are best, and how we should decide. Who should decide what our goals and values should be now that God and the priests have left the building?