Comment by mhl47
2 days ago
How do you arrive at the statement that a cavemen would have the same intelligence as a human today? Intelligence is surely not usually defined as the cognitive potential at birth but as the current capability. And the knowledge an average human has today through education surely factors into that.
Your attempt to commingle intelligence and knowledge is not needed to support your initial question. The original statement that a caveman 200K years ago would have the same intelligence as a modern human was blankly asserted without any supporting evidence, and so it is valid to simply question the claim. You do not need to give a counterclaim, as that is unnecessarily shifting the burden of proof.
Knowledge is a thing you can use intelligence on, but not a component of intelligence itself.
The knowledge that everything is made out of atoms/molecules however makes it much easier to reason about your environment. And based on this knowledge you also learn algorithms, how to solve problems etc. I dont think its possible to completely separate knowledge from intelligence.
But an intelligent being could learn that, do you think they become more intelligent if you tell them things are made out of atoms? To me the answer is very simple, no they don't become more intelligent.
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Separating knowledge from intelligence is not a given.
You can give an intelligent being knowledge but you can't give a book intelligence. So I think its easy to separate knowledge from intelligence.
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I think the core idea is that if a baby with "caveman genetics" so to speak were to be born today, they could achieve similar intellectual results to the (average?) rest of the population. At least that's how I interpret it.
It's even sillier than that. You can look at populations in the modern world and see there are huge differences in intelligence due to various factors such as cousin marriage and nutrition.