Aren't We All Patterns

Growing up, you always hear “Albert Einstein had an IQ of 160”, “your cousin is so smart, she has an IQ of xyz, she’ll go to Harvard”, and then stare at you, as if you are the dumbest person to exist because you can not score as high as a freaking Nobel Prize winning person.

Often when the topic of “intelligence’ is brought up, people in the field of science, mathematics or IT are highly regarded. They are taken as the optimum; as a trophy for what it means to be intelligent. Intelligence Quotient, or IQ, is taken as the deflate measure for ones capability in the world, and if you have low IQ, you indirectly, between the lines have less IQ in the world than the others. It feels demeaning to people who cannot score as high as the society would like them to. This is not a rant against IQ or people who do well on it or people in the TEM field, what it is about how variable the comprehension of knowledge can be.

Of course the field of STEM is difficult and requires a specific skillset to survive and excel in it. However, that applies to all the fields. You need to have the ability to understand geo politics and economics if you’re the leader of a country for example. Now, this applies to everything in our life. Music requires patterns. Painting - patterns, writing - patterns, anthropology - patterns, cinema- patterns. Everything around us is pattern. We exist because there is a pattern to the universe. So how do you expect that if someone who does not understand the patterns in IQ doesn’t understand patterns at all and that is the only reason they should belong in the humanities field. The problem isn’t the person taking the test, it is how the test is made. Because patterns aren’t absolute and do not exist transparently, the people who “fail” the test recognise patterns which are less obvious, which are very sensitive to perception, for which you need to go in with an open mind. What IQ tests excel at is recognising logical thinking (to a certain extent), because there are fields which follow logic and rules, and you cannot bend them or go over them because that is condition of that topic. However, critical thinking is difficult to measure, because here you question what pattern is right for the context you’re in. You think beyond the box, but still with a grounded thinking. Philosophy’s core is critical thinking, if its lost, you just end up writing an imaginative or fictional piece. Its not like philosophy does not follow logic, but logic is less of a priority than a critical perspective.

Furthermore, AI is an example of a programme which can efficiently “think” logically but lacks critically, at least right now. It is not because AI isn’t intelligence, its literally in its name, its because what we human prioritised. You tell AI to solve an equations versus you tell it to analyse a film sequence, which one would you think it would perform better at? It would be an equation because it is more logical, it has set rules and a format to follow, as compared to a qualitative analysis which requires more critical thinking because rules are more bendable than the latter. So imagine someone calling AI dumb because it can’t do a science analysis. It’s just not in its coding. Similar to us humans, we have a set of ‘coding’ in us which gives us the ability to understand a certain area of patterns better than the other patterns. The intelligence we measure is the intelligence we are replicating.

I feel like it was any other species that had the opportunity to develop consciousness which could comprehend ideas such complex and the ability to think beyond their basic nature, the understanding or rather the “truth” of the world would be different. They’d see different, more or less wavelengths than use. Our senses and instincts would differ. I do wonder what would be the rules of physics be defined as then. Now I am not saying that 1 + 1 = 2 would change. There is absolute rules to the language of our universe, and I understand that. What I actually mean is that what would they do with that 1 + 1 = 2 rule. How would they apply it. What other discoveries would it lead to that we couldn’t figure out.

I think at the core of it, what I really want to say is patterns exist everywhere, in each and every subject. It is important that we accept that intelligence isn’t only numbers, but rather how to use your ability to understanding patterns. And that not every human will have the same understanding of the world because we are all perceptual beings, and if there were to be some other species instead of us on this planet who would be studying everything, things would be slightly different because their perception, literal and metaphysical would be different.

I had a conversation with someone who said that physicists and mathematicians are the future and they have a very fertile and logical mind. He is not wrong, indeed both fields have very fertile mind and a logical one too, but they are not the only future. We need every field that exists and to be honest does not exist to be together as a society. Films inspire science, and vice verse. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir just got released as a film, and it did something beautiful - it combined cinephiles and scientists. Its a story about a scientist, uses complex science but without the words and direction, it wouldn’t reach wide audiences. This film probably inspired a lot of people to either become a writer, join cinema or the academia world of science. This is what happens when patterns combine, they create a very complex yet open understanding. There are so many examples like there where both work wonderfully to evoke emotion in us. Or we take the film Interstellar, where the director Christopher Nolan was adamant on making a very realistic image of a black hole for a film. Kip Thorne comes in, works on mathematical models to help render images for the black hole, leading to several research papers being written. Two people who recognise different types of patterns collaborated, creating a masterpiece. Truth could be absolute, but our interpretation and application of it are not.

Intelligence is not just the ability to recognise obvious patterns, but the ability to perceive different kinds of patterns; some logical, some emotional, some abstract, some invisible to others. The world, or rather the society needs to stop treating on subject and intelligence tests as the ultimate god, and understand the we are multifaceted. Some of us will see the same patterns, some different, but at the end of the day, aren’t we all patterns?