Human Intelligence Redescribed

The standard description of human intelligence, heavily influenced by the concept of general intelligence ability, depicts intelligence as being primarily a brain-based and biological activity, in which increasing levels of intelligence are associated to increasing effectiveness within the human neural system. Nonetheless, there are several known scenarios that do not fit into this standard description, the most prominent being the Flynn effect and its surprising revelation about the increasing nature of raw intelligence scores. Accordingly, this essay proposes an alternative description of human intelligence, one that focuses on the fundamental mismatch between general intelligence ability and raw measurable intelligence, resolving this mismatch by demonstrating that measurable intelligence can be accurately and meaningfully described as being the orthogonal combination of general intelligence ability and the totality of artificial construction contained within the human environment. There are three advantages to this alternative description of human intelligence: one, it gives a specific and observable depiction of the material nature of human intelligence; two, it forgoes any biologically or evolutionarily extraordinary alterations to the human brain; and three, it provides a straightforward account of the Flynn effect.