Kevin Kelly has got me thinking about thinking

I tend to think of intelligence as the ability to think, but Kevin Kelly points out that HOW we think can vary wildly.

• We have 'world models' versus 'working memory.'
• We have 'logical reasoning' versus 'planning.'

Some of his categories, such as 'symbol grounding' sound a little too specific... but I'm not sure what he means by the term, so I expect he could convince me. I think of Kevin as one of the super-brains on the planet. Here's his Wikipedia profile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Kelly_(editor)

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The TechniumKevin Kelly

I do think that my thinking excels in certain areas, and not in others. For instance, I couldn't navigate myself out of a paper bag, but I'm good at analysis.

This reminds me of Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences, but it's not quite the same thing. Kelly is looking at all sorts of ways of processing information, and his thinking is specifically stimulated by AI development.

Here's a graphic representation of Gardner's ideas from the Wikipedia article linked above:

In contrast, Kevin says,

Waves, force fields, particles of atoms did not make sense (and still does not make common sense). It required sophisticated mathematics to truly comprehend it, and even after Maxwell described it mathematically, he found it hard to visualize.

I expect the same from intelligence. Even after we identify its ingredients, the emergent properties they generate are likely to be obscure and hard to believe, hard to visualize. Intelligence is unlikely to make common sense. 

I hope he's wrong about that, and that artificial intelligence will help us understand and leverage our own ability to think. I also think "ingredients" is a good way to analyze our thinking ability. What nutritional ingredients does your brain have?