Intellect

Was driving down to Madurai from Erode. My car has just an FM radio receiver. So I had to listen to whatever Kodai FM, Kodaikanal was playing at that time.

This is one of the many times when I have been left to the mercy of this radio station. Usually the songs played are ones one wouldn’t hear in the normal course of time. With no offence meant to their DJs, the programs are more or less boring.

Then there is this program at 10 am – a debate on simple topics – with views put forward on a topic by the laymen of Tamil Nadu’s hinterland. The moderator is a professor, who tries to make the arguments sound simple than what the respondents put forth originally.

Today’s topic was “Does comparison of oneself to others lead to good or bad?” The topic seemed fairly innocuous for me at the beginning of the drive. The respondents to this debate will be the grocery shop owners, men who run telephone booths, unemployed people, farmers, etc.

But when the arguments started flowing in, I was amazed at the quality of the responses. The ideas expressed were original with a very good mix of real life, cinematic, lyrical and inspirational allegories.

One person from an unknown village near Kodumudi, Erode put forth the following argument:

“comparing oneself with others makes one lose his/her individuality”

This I think is the essence of the whole discussion. He was referring to the moderator as “ayya”. He told the moderator that he was just a 10th standard pass out, running a small grocery shop. Intellect is not dependent on education and social upbringing. It is imbibed through something other than mere institutions.

When I posted this in 2007 in this blog, one of my friends commented thus:

“In fact I would say education, at least the form that we went through actually kills any leftover intellect”.

Intellect is the thought process distilled to crisp. Intellect is the one drop of ocean water that contains unobtanium that can fuel a space ship for 2 billion light years, that drop that is quarried from countless others insignificant. Intellect is the force of consciousness, purified by truth. Intellect is not something that comes on Monday and leaves the next Monday. Intellect is the basis of man’s natural superiority in the world order. Intellect is why we are the top of the food chain. Intellect creates art, inventions, revolutions, books and thoughts. Intellect builds our moral strength. Intellect creates the plane on which we transact with the world, the playing field of thoughts and emotions.

Intellect includes traits such as creativity, personality, character, knowledge and wisdom. Intellect is a property of the mind, which actualizes our abstract thought, reasoning, planning and problem solving, use of language, and learning.

People differ from each other in their capability to understand ideas, abstract thinking, adapting to environments, reasoning in various forms and importantly solving problems through thought. Intellect is never consistent and can not be linear or equal in measure. So a person’s intellectual capability will vary on different times, different problems and different environments, when the criteria for measurement vary. While a poet will be measured for his works’ beauty and flow, so the scientist for his truth, precision and proof.

Dr. Howard Gardner – “To my mind, a human intellectual competence must entail a set of skills of problem solving — enabling the individual to resolve genuine problems or difficulties that he or she encounters and, when appropriate, to create an effective product — and must also entail the potential for finding or creating problems — and thereby laying the groundwork for the acquisition of new knowledge”.

The essence of all definitions I found in wikipedia is this:

Intellectual capability is how effectively an individual deals with cognitive complexities that arise out of the problems he encounters, work he wants to create, knowledge he needs to gain to solve, explain and create.

Intellect is the agent that triggers the intellection in the mind, the force that moves the potential to actual.

When the early Greeks and Indian philosophies likened intellect to God, modern empirical theories have evidently made it a much simpler cognitive function, which it is. So intellect and intellectual capability have become the basis of all consciousness and our standing in nature, because these 2 terms represent our capability to create other than what we get from earth and our capability to determine what happens in and on earth and in the future what happens in other earths.

Our education has depended on memory and not on cognition. Cognition for children stops with outside the school. How does he learn to use a PC? Somewhere we have oversimplified education to black and white, to suit 100 children in a classroom and 100 million children in the country. Our system doesn’t have the time to let children think through problems. Education, from training to intellection, has become the domain of people who don’t want to believe that education is just these 3 words in spirit and 3 more in action care, fairness and dedication.