kurt

Petals Around the Rose

A game like this seems designed to make us question our intelligence.

Play.

It reminds me of playing a different game called Psychiatrist (or maybe psychologist) in my dorm the first year at UCLA. Again the object of the game is to figure out the rules of the game. Those that organize the game already know the answer and have the twisted satisfaction of watching others struggle to break the code. I hate it. And yet I can't resist the urge to try and solve the puzzle. I was the last person in a group of about 15 (everyone sits in a circle) that hadn't figured out the secret to Psychiatrist. Eventually I just gave up and they told me the answer. It was humiliating. Somehow this silly game had undermined my intellectual confidence.

This all reminds me of a theory of intelligence distilled to mere pattern recognition: humans are good pattern recognizers, thus they are intelligent. Of course the mechanism/s that allow us to recognize patterns across a wide spectrum of sensory experiences are complex, subjective and unique. When we share a common linguistic and cultural history, we can then leverage that as a database for communication when we work and for obfuscation when we play. In a sort of simplistic generality I would say that when we are "working" we are rewarded for recognizing obvious (or practical at the least) patterns quickly and efficiently but when we are "playing" we are rewarded for recognizing obscure (or impractical) patterns. Most people can do the former well: humans are keen on repetition (so are computer systems). The latter is tricky: it's rare to find a person (or a computer system) that can consistently recognize the unusual patterns in games (or life). We play pattern games as a way of encouraging elliptical thinking and discouraging linear thinking. Many popular business strategy/training clichés have been hacked together in an attempt to capitalize on this. Of course the irony is that the "elliptical thinking" games become standardized, then all we have is another standard, another regularized pattern that we process ever more quickly and efficiently.

So after having my intellectual ego deflated by such a simple game, I naturally reflect on the meaning of intelligence (more specifically, the meaning of my intelligence: Does my failure to solve one puzzle reveal my brain to be banal and linear?) As much as we admire the mnemonic or mathematical savant, the patterns are trivial. The advances in human thought come not from an ability to repeat the same task quickly and efficiently but from an ability to make leaps of logic. We don't strive to become more like "computers", specialized routines unable to deviate from their code, but to make computers become more like us: creative beings.

There is a social value for the word intelligence. It is mostly centered on aptitude for language, math and memorization. Our educational system seems to want, ideally, to forge us into robots with highly specific skills (it doesn't) so we could participate fluidly in a much larger social machine. Whether the student rises to the top of the class or flunks, the stratification of the population is essential to the system. Sounds rigid rather than intelligent, but it provides us with a necessary hierarchy right? Those that are athletic go one way, those that are "artistic" (a semantic mess) another and those that are intelligent (the social value) take up positions of authority, both strategically and economically (perhaps they're the same). And what happens to the leftovers? What a sad, elitist way to think of those that don't fit the traditional patterns for success. There must be a lesson here about conformity... but I'll leave it this movie.

Intelligence is not a standard, not a routine, not a regularity.
Intelligence is not a pattern itself.

I took about 10 minutes to figure out Petals Aound the Rose.

But that is meaningless.