Human Intelligence is an Illusion

[The__Chameleon]

Imagine a master painter creating a masterpiece one brush stroke at a time. Each movement of his hand meticulously chosen to create the desired effect. Yet, what if each of those motions was chosen for him before he was consciously aware of the choice and only took credit for it upon the moment of that awareness? Experiments by Libet, Soon, Fried, Haynes and others suggest exactly that. So let us presuppose that what we think of as free will is in fact the product of natural laws acting upon the brain at a subconscious level and then appearing as conscious choice the moment before it's acted upon. Free will would therefore be an illusion. If this is true, then it would logically follow that all characteristics of, or stemming from free will would then also be illusions, including, but not limited to, human intelligence, and personal identity. And if one considers this at least plausible, then what we have defined as intelligence comes not from us, but from the sum of natural laws acting upon us. Therefore, by our own benchmark of intelligence, the sum of these laws qualifies, and therefore they can not technically be considered natural at all.


The sum of all physical laws must either be considered to have intelligence or the word "intelligence" must be considered meaningless. For if we consider intelligence to be, at it's source, the product of purely natural phenomena, then it loses all meaning. I propose the former to be the case. And I call this new found "god" The Puppetmaster as it predetermines everything people think and do and does not bestow upon its robotic  creations free will, but merely the vain illusory perception thereof.


... Your thoughts?