What is intelligence? Is she more intelligent than you? Is he the most intelligent student in the class? Undoubtedly, you have engaged in a conversation of this sort before. But fundamentally, how can you even define intelligence? Many psychologists have tried to formalize intelligence through psychometrics; the most familiar being the modern IQ test developed by William Stern and refined by David Wechsler. Yet, this only seems to test abstract thinking and problem solving. There is more to intelligence than that; what about effective communication, emotional intelligence, organizing, long term problem solving, and the ability to learn? Is the woman who can speak ten languages more intelligent than the CEO of a Fortune 500 company? How could humans gauge the intelligence of others and effectively rank them? I do not think we have an effective method (yet). When you meet an intelligent person, you can’t define it, you just know they have it.

While neuroplasticity in recent years has shown our brains are not as limited as we originally thought, there is still a general limit to the intelligence of a person. The way our brains are structured may simply render us incapable of learning a particular a subject, or many. However, there is one area of thinking that everyone can learn to apply: reason. Intellectualism seems a term that can be vaguely defined, unlike intelligence. In my observation and understanding, intellectuals are people who use knowledge to think critically and apply reason to understand knowledge. Anyone, nobody how intelligent, can be an intellectual. Applying reason means uses logic in your discourse, asking questions, scaling the claims against the evidence, striving for knowledge and the truth. No amount of intelligence guarantees you will find truth; an intellectual realizes this. An intellectual will humbly admit ignorance, but let this ignorance drive their pursuit of knowledge and then use reason to discern the truth. This is what our world needs more of. We need a world of intellectuals – where everyone engages in intelligent conversation, where we combine our various areas of expertise, where reason defines this conversation to find the truth.

Every Sunday, I will publish a point to ponder — hopefully it will be both thought-provoking and insightful. I look forward to receiving replies, both positive and negative. The whole point of this blog is to spark conversation, to serve as a platform for examination and intellectual growth. In Socratic style, the discussions will leave no subject untouched, no taboo observed, everything is open for discussion. As Socrates stated, “an unexamined life is not worth living.” I hope you will join me in this endeavor to examine these issues.