Explaining Intelligence to a Creationist

A creationist says... "By continuing to define all of intelligence through the physical and biological processes that allow our brains to access such you are ignoring the realm revealed by intelligence. It is as if you are defining an antenna through the processes that lead to its manufacture."

Hard to unravel what point is being made here, but let's try...

Let's start with the basic steps of how information arrives from our surroundings and provides input to the models we create...

Technology Example	Biological Example
Low frequency electromagnetic radiation (radio) travelling through space or the atmosphere, causes an electro-chemical reaction in the antenna	Medium frequency electromagnetic radiation (light) travelling through space or the atmosphere, causes an electro-chemical reaction in the retina
This results in small voltages across the terminals of the antenna	This results in small voltages in photosensitive proteins.
The changing voltages create an electrical signal which travels through wires to a radio receiver (essentially a computer)	The changing voltages create an electrical signal which travels down the optic nerve to the part of the brain known as the visual cortex.
The computer has a number of processing circuits which process the data from the antenna. The first processes clean the data, removing interference and parsing gaps in the signal.	The visual cortex has a number of circuits which process the data from the eye. The first processes detect edges, colours and motion.
The second set of processors render the signal into sound (or visual) models of the information captured by the antenna	The second set of processors specialise in detecting faces and complete objects. The processors combine to render a visual model of the information captured by the eye.
Some devices will analyse the incoming data and use this to control mechanisms which move the antenna to improve or enhance the incoming signal.	Data streams in separate directions to provide information for eye & limb movements

The interesting bits are the bits to do with what we loosely refer to as “intelligence” in steps 4 and beyond. The “visual models” exist within the computer. The radio “perceives” its model of the information it receives – but that’s no good to us. We need to perceive it ourselves. So we connect the device to a monitor and/or speakers, so that we can observe the model that is rendered inside the computer’s “mind”. 

The brain is similar. It renders a model based on the signals it has received which we perceive. If we could connect our brains to monitors, we could perceive the models that other peoples’ brains are perceiving. Technology now exists to do this, but the images are very low resolution and there’s a long way to go before we can accurately “read” peoples minds. This will have major benefits for people in comas or who have "locked in " syndrome. But that's another subject.

Blind people have no eyes – but they have a visual cortex which means they can use it to render models of the world around them – but instead of data from the eye, the visual cortex uses some of the data from other senses. Blind people can’t “see” but they can “visualise”. 

The vision processors in the brain can render images without any data from the eyes. They can use data from memories which can be reprocessed to create dreams. We can consciously create visual images by deliberately willing the visual processors to create images. This also happens subconsciously. If I tell you not to think about a pink elephant, your visual cortex will instantly render a model of a pink elephant. 

It is also possible to trigger visual models in the brain by directly stimulating the visual cortex with electrical signals from an electrode, or by using chemicals (drugs). In this way you can visualise things you've never seen! The dangerous side to this is that you would have memories of having seen things that you never saw. Your brain has been hacked! If we use our computer analogy, this is as if we disconnected the antenna and instead created a stream of data from another computer program, instead of radio waves. We've hacked into the computer 

And what of the source of these radio waves? They could be man made from a radio show, or natural from a distant quasar. The computer’s processors can render them in a way that suits our preferences. This rendering does not necessarily match reality (but what is reality?). A radio presenter’s voice can be modified by the processors to sound richer, or higher pitched, or more sibilant, etc. The way he "sounds" to you might not be the way he "sounds" to me - but we can both name him! The signals from a distant quasar can be rendered into a full colour, 3D visual model which helps us understand the nature of the quasar even though we can’t see any light from it and the colours we’ve used to render it are false. Again, our brains do the same thing. I have no idea if what you see as “blue” is actually the same as I see blue. But it doesn’t matter. We each have a model that works. We each call it “reality” even though the models are different! 

So... antenna is analogous to an eye. Brain is analogous to a computer, and intelligence is analogous to the rendering of a model created by the computer's programs. 

Another way to understand aspects of intelligence is to think about GT website. It doesn't exist as an artefact or object. At its lowest level it is bits and bytes. Somewhere in California there is a server which renders the entire site. That server "perceives" the site in some way. It contains a model of the site that we cannot perceive. What we can do is connect monitors to that server and program the server to render the website on a monitor we can see it. But if all the PC monitors in the world were broken so that the website could not be seen - it would still exist, as a model, inside the computer. 

Now a computer is a very loose analogy for a brain because the brain is trillions of times more complex and massively parallel. But hopefully, that analogy helps to explain how intelligence can be abstract, intangible, but also very real, and a product of electro-chemical processes.