The Nature of Intelligence: A New Look at the Foundations of Sociology

Abstract

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) stimulates interdisciplinary research aimed at establishing the essence/nature of intelligence. Without an adequate answer to this question, discussions about which systems should be attributed to AI and which should not remain pointless. This paper shows that human intelligence should be considered primarily as an attribute of the Homo Sapience species as a whole. The existence of a global communication network, formed as a result of information exchange between its relatively independent fragments localized within the brain of individuals has been proved. Human intelligence is a kind of projection of information objects that appear in the global network on its local sections. These objects have their own non-trivial behavior, which is only indirectly related to the behavior of individuals. It is these objects that arise at the transpersonal level of information processing that largely determine the properties of society as a whole. The nature of these objects is analogous to the nature of individual consciousness. The consciousness of each person is the result of the exchange of information between neurons of a separate brain, the same exchange within the global network (or its relatively independent fragments - states, ethnic groups, etc.) generates transpersonal information objects, at least possessing many signs of consciousness and intelligence. The existence of these objects allows us to fully translate sociological research into the language of mathematical theories Moreover, the fact that information exchange is now largely moving to telecommunications networks makes it possible to study them quantitatively. An opportunity to provide a natural science justification for the concepts of geopolitics is justified too. These concepts initially considered states as analogs of organisms with their own non-trivial behavior. The proposed approach makes it possible to find quantitative regularities that express the concept of geopolitics.