What Are Intelligence? And Why? 1996 AAAI Presidential Address

It has, for example, been interpreted in a variety of ways even within our own field, ranging from the logical view (intelligence as part of mathematical logic) to the psychological view (intelligence as an empirical phenomenon of the natural world) to a variety of others. Our physical bodies are in many ways overdetermined, unnecessarily complex, and inefficiently designed, that is, the predictable product of the blind search that is evolution. Natural intelligence is unlikely to be limited by principles of parsimony and is likely to be overdetermined, unnecessarily complex, and inefficiently designed. One example is the view that thinking is in part visual, and hence it might prove useful to develop representations and reasoning mechanisms that reason with diagrams (not just about them) and that take seriously their visual nature.