Davos 2010 - IdeasLab with MIT - Rebecca Saxe
http://www.weforum.org/ IdeasLab with MIT Join the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the IdeasLab to discover the latest insights and perspectives on the ...
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So, as Josh was just saying, what's distinctive about human intelligence is not just its speed or capacity, but our ability to go beyond the visible statistics of our environment to infer the hidden causes that explain what we see. So only one of these pictures of wild flowers makes you infer the presence of an invisible person. And similarly, when we see something complicated or surprising, the invisible cause we most often infer is another person or at least another mind. So think about crop circles or intelligent design or, my favorite, an??? word that means someone seen from a far off and blamed for otherwise inexplicable circumstances. So in a real sense human intelligence is intelligence about humans. And correspondingly, if you look inside the brain of a human adult, ...
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So, as Josh was just saying, what's distinctive about human intelligence is not just its speed or capacity, but our ability to go beyond the visible statistics of our environment to infer the hidden causes that explain what we see. So only one of these pictures of wild flowers makes you infer the presence of an invisible person. And similarly, when we see something complicated or surprising, the invisible cause we most often infer is another person or at least another mind. So think about crop circles or intelligent design or, my favorite, an??? word that means someone seen from a far off and blamed for otherwise inexplicable circumstances. So in a real sense human intelligence is intelligence about humans. And correspondingly, if you look inside the brain of a human adult, ...
