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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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the American definition of intelligence is understanding, the European one is predicting.

The article says the opposite: for Americans (Stanford AI lab specifically) it's "the ability to adapt to new situations, and learn from experience", which is somewhat related to "prediction", and for "Europe" (Larousse specifically) it's "the set of mental functions whose goal is conceptual and rational knowledge", or in other words explanations and understanding.

To me, it's more of a distinction between the modern and the old-fashioned concept of someone being of high intellect. Nowadays modern schooling trends are all about competencies and skills and tools and the "how", while old-fashioned Prussian style education emphasized lexical knowledge and Bildung, being able to recite poems, knowing many facts and their connections etc. Also in that sense an "intelligent man" is also intertwined with knowing etiquette, being polite and so on. "Smart" has the same duality. Of course the prediction and navigating unknown situations and figuring out solutions in difficult situations type concept is also known to all cultures. If we don't use the word intelligent, English has words for this like quick-thinking, quick-witted, sharp, and perhaps tangentially some sense of "shrewd" with some disapproval.

But the situation with consciousness is a bit different.

Maybe it's just a me thing, but I distinctly remember that it was quite unintuitive for me that I am supposedly having perceptions with qualia in my consciousness and apparently my mind is in there too somehow or whatnot. Like as a teen when getting familiar with these kinds of interesting books in English I didn't intuitively think of myself as looking out some rectangular window from inside a Cartesian theater onto the world, separated by some kind of pane of glass. I think a much more natural notion is that I simply see the things in front of me and it makes me aware of their 3D arrangement and state, color etc. I don't see some kind of red qualia, I just see an object and I perceive that the object is red. There is no intermediate redness qualia. Of course it's a naive view and perception is very active yadda yadda, but no, it feels passive. You open your eyes and the world is there. Not icons and whatnot, it's the things out there in the world. Optical illusions are fun because they reveal that this view is indeed naive and perception relies on lots of assumptions and priors.

Also I think the Anglo-analytical philosophy sees consciousness quite differently from the continental phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. In the Anglo view it's really like the world as clockwork is basically pretty complete if only it wasn't for this one little puzzle piece here, which we label "consciousness" and we don't quite know what it's for, but we guess it's going to fit somewhere in this complete-seeming puzzle, we just have to look a bit more closely. While in the other view it's much more integrated into all the rest of the things, but I'm quite out of my depth here.