On Defining Genius

My wife and I are watching Celebrity Traitors, and we’re frequently amused by how often the other participants refer to Stephen Fry as a ‘genius’. Stephen Fry is not, of course, a genius. He’s very knowledgeable, and quite intelligent, but not a genius. The overuse of the term genius tends to happen when people are too generous about what a genius actually is. It’s a bit like a dwarf claiming a person of slightly above average height is a giant. So, anyway, my sweetheart and I proceeded to pause Celebrity Traitors and discuss what constitutes a genius. “Fear not”, I said, “the Preface in my book The Genius of the Invisible God, and one of my letters in Dear Treasured You, briefly discusses this very thing.” 😊

So, I emailed it to my sweetheart, and thought it might be of interest here too. This is how I view ‘genius’.  

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Excerpt from Dear Treasured You......

I don't think it is the case that a person is a genius. I think genius is a cosmic, metaphysical force - like love, beauty, justice, grace, mercy, joy and fulfilment - it's something greater than us that we tap into. Genius seems to me to be a comment about not just the within, but the without too - it's a term that rightly confers glory on individual accomplishment, but alongside which shines light on qualities that transcend the immediacy of the achievement. You can commend individuals for permanently changing the way that humanity perceives the world, and the high praise and regard is fully deserved. But in doing so, we are also, in a sense, giving them credit for discovering something that appears to be already existent but awaiting discovery. Shakespeare took playwriting to a level never surpassed before or since; Darwin helped revolutionise biology, Einstein did the same with physics; and Mozart did the same with music. But while there's no doubt that these minds, and many like them, have made huge contributions to our world - those contributions seem more like revelations that tap into something more ineffably profound and mysterious than the constituent parts of the contributions themselves.

I believe each of us can pursue our own excellence of self and draw profoundly from the well of potential within us, which involves the gradual bringing out of human qualities that most people believe are reserved for a few hundred special people. That is the scent of genius that we are forever following in the trailing winds of its mysteries. The art of words, numbers, visualisation and music convey deep truths about reality, and form a body of shared experience around which intellects and artists revolve.

Here's an interesting corollary of the above point. Many of the geniuses of yesteryear - in poetry, philosophy, art, literature, music and film - did not acquire the status of 'genius' until years (sometimes centuries) after their work was produced. It's as though humanity had to grow into its own shoes in recognising the wider picture that surrounds the genius of the contributions. We think we have uncovered genius when we come across talents like Shakespeare and Einstein, who can give exhibition to such extraordinary human qualities – either with brilliant use of language, or mathematical formulae in science, or something of that kind. But while it is true that some people are endowed with higher mental acuity and greater vision than others, genius is vast enough and prevalent enough to encourage the greatest exploration of the brilliant potential inside yourself. This might be the strangest paradox about genius; its provenance belongs without, but it can only be personally cultivated from drawing out the greatest potential from within.

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Excerpt from The Genius of the Invisible God.....

One of the ways I define genius is that the average, good and great producers of their craft do what others might be able to do with similar time, effort and creativity - whereas the genius produces craft that nearly all others would never produce with similar time, effort and creativity. In other words, a genius operates not by doing more within a dimension, but by dipping his or her toe into a new one that others didn’t see existed. Given the same tools, time, and imagination, the genius extracts results that the rest of us couldn’t even conceive were possible. When you consider real geniuses – like Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Dirac, von Neumann, da Vinci, Shakespeare, Mozart, etc - you’ll notice that where other intelligent and creative people improve upon what is, the genius taps into a profound landscape that reflects what could be - and makes it real before the world even has conception or language for it.

Engaging with the mind of a genius – if one is encouraged to pursue it to the maximum potential - is rather like sensing the gradual enlightenment as one watches the glistening night sky turn into a beautiful sunlight next morning. For ourselves as we watch the light illuminate the sky, the hours may seem like a long hunting trip; times of fighting the cold wind and steep climbs are interrupted with intoxicating moments of suspense and delight at what one finds when the uniformity of space and time is jolted by a new perspective, as we get more enthralled by the object of our chase.

I believe that the closer we can get to feeding our own genius and developing our potential, the more we will start to see that the world is full of philosophical cheats and deceptions – many of which begin as honest enquiries and steadfast endeavours. I use the term ‘feeding our genius’ because in this book I am going to speak of genius as being more than just a qualitative part of a human’s abilities – for I believe that whatever ‘genius’ we possess internally, either through inspiration or perspiration, is always being fed by a bigger form of genius out there in the conceptual landscape. We are always extrapolating from bigger things than ourselves.

William Burroughs drew a distinction in art between tonal and nagual art. The tonal universe is the more empirically predictable cause-and-effect universe, whereas the nagual is the less foreseeable, intractable elements of reality that burst through unannounced and beyond the radar of prediction. Burroughs saw the nagual as more unpredictable and harder to creatively construct than the more predictable and manageable patterns of the tonal. As he reflected, "For the nagual to gain access, the door of chance must be open".

Whether it be the painter with his formulae of form and colour applied to a canvas, or the writer with the congregation of words to paper, the true ‘genius’ of creativity is not in the person doing it, but it is being continually re-crafted by tapping into something transcendent of the self. This isn't a scientific viewpoint, it is an artistic feeling. Norman Mailer once suggested that William Burroughs was "possessed by genius" as opposed to ‘being’ a genius or even ‘possessing’ genius. The dynamic spontaneity of ‘genius’ is nagual according to Mailer and Burroughs, and to be possessed ‘by’ genius is to tap into something altogether special and grander than ourselves. At first glance, it might seem like something that finds itself located in the collective nature of human minds, in that we share it, and all, in our own way, seek to take possession of it. But even the collective human minds are obtaining the genius from somewhere much grander than themselves - it is too grand to be contained merely within the human species, stupendous as it is, nonetheless.

The Circuit Board Of Mental Excellence

Minds are perhaps best thought of like circuit boards - and a coherent, consistent, accurate worldview is represented by a set of small lights that all stay illuminated in conjunction with truth and facts. Information, in the form of propositions, is like enlarging the circuit board, and increasing the assembly of data circuits and the copper that delivers electricity to illuminate the lights.

The size of the light display depends on the dimensions of the worldview, which itself primarily depends on the time, effort and intellectual rigour put in to the process of building a larger and larger circuit board that can facilitate an ever-increasing light display. A genius polymath may have a light display about the size of a football field; a highly intelligent polymath may have one about the size of a tennis court; and an average person may have one about the size of a small back garden.

Now here's the key thing. You can increase the dimensions of the light display by learning more, and by increasing the connectivity of your mental artillery - and to some extent, most people do this on their life journey. But what they don't do enough is stand back and check the light display to see how many of the bulbs have gone out. Nor do they step back and observe clusters of light patterns that have gaps because the additional bulbs required to illuminate the pattern more comprehensively are missing.

A large, light display with all the bulbs illuminated is extremely rare - but it ought to be the primary objective for anyone who strives for truth, facts, proficiency of reasoning and excellence of mind. The beauty of the light display is that its consistency of illumination is exhibition to the fact that one's ideas, thoughts, views and propositions fit nicely into the rest of the circuit board of experience. If you keep getting things right, the new beliefs operate consistently with the structural workings of the circuit board, not disrupting the electricity to other items on the board. But if you get things wrong, and introduce faulty viewpoints into the equation, you disrupt the electricity flow, both to local illumination clusters, but also to isolated bulbs elsewhere in the display.

Naturally, given the complexity of the mind, and the complexity of everything there is to know, and the near infinite ways to perceive reality, this is a really epistemologically intractable model of analysis. But it isn't that difficult to identify practical examples of how the malfunctioning of the circuit board may occur, as most people host mutually contradictory or incongruent ideas, especially due to identity-based dispositions, cognitive biases, emotional self-preservation and propensities for over-simplicity.

For example, suppose you're a Christian with a fairly comprehensive understanding of scripture, but because of your upbringing you've been infected with the cultural virus of young earth creationism, with a limited recourse for correctives. The cluster of lights pertaining to Biblical exegesis and hermeneutics is going to be affected as the connection between the conductors supplying the electrical power will be shorted. The high current flow of falsity will put out some of the theological lights, and prevent other bulbs from being added to the cluster. This will mean others see you as a Christian with inadequacies in several areas of discourse - especially when it comes to Biblical interpretation of text and other related areas of science and how the edifice operates and functions - which will have a corollary effect on the consistency of your worldview, and on the impression and influence you have on the world as a Christian.

Here's another example. Suppose you're quite economically and politically astute, but you become duped into believing that there is a systematically unfair gender pay gap in the UK, or that price controls on housing might alleviate the shortage. As with the first example, your circuit board will be negatively impacted, lights will go out in various areas across the display, and there will be patches in the clusters that never get the bulbs required for a full illumination of the pattern. You might start believing that price controls in other areas of the economy will start to do some further good; or you might start over-exaggerating the extent to which climate change alarmism is fruitful; or you might take your eye of the principles behind the law of least effort; or you might develop too much a victim-mentality, and so forth.

I could offer loads more examples, but I think the gist of this is crystal clear: there is always a price to pay for bad ideas, false beliefs and inadequate reasoning - and these things infect; first at the individual level, then at the familial level, then at the community level, and then more widely across societies and even nations as falsehoods spread memetically.

By equal measure, though, there are always rewards for building a prodigious circuit board that provides the power to a fully illuminated light display that consistently, coherently, factually and truthfully supports the ideas, views and beliefs associated with all the major and minor subjects, and the interconnectedness between them all. In fact, I'll take it further: there is no better way to live, and no more rewarding and no more necessary and no more morally and intellectually compelled pursuits for any human being.

Let's Face It, Human Intelligence Is Boltzmannian, Not Gaussian

In terms of distribution of intelligence across the nation, rather than the assumed normal distribution - a Gaussian bell curve of intelligence (as above) - I think the distribution of people in the UK would more closely resemble the Boltzmann distribution (see below), where on the horizontal axis 0.1 is the lowest level of intelligence and 7 is a genius.

This is quite intriguing, given that as a rule, approximately 68% of measured values (be they height, weight, blood pressure, and so on) fall within one standard deviation of the mean; approximately 95% of the values fall within two standard deviations from the mean; and a whopping 99.7% of all values fall within three standard deviations from the mean (also illustrated in the image above).

On the other hand, as you can see from the image below, the Boltzmann distribution is biased, and decays exponentially. The analogy to intelligence here being that if the y axis on the graph is number of particles, and the x axis is amount of energy, then no particles will have zero energy, some will have very low energy, many will have medium energy, and as we get to the lower part of the curve, we see only a relatively few people have super high energy. If you replace particles with people and energy with applied intelligence you’ll find it’s a pretty good analogy.  

If we take human intelligence, or perhaps more accurately the extent to which humans have ever applied their potential capacity, we find that it seems not to be like a bell curve at all - rather it's heavily skewed towards the low end, like the Boltzmann distribution. 

So, for example, on a scale of 1-100, where 1 is very low on intelligence, and 100 are the most brilliant minds, if you take the entire population of the UK, my experience indicates to me that the vast majority of people are in the category below 50, with about half being under 25. In fact, I'd guess that broken into percentages it would be roughly as follows, where percentage is percentage of the population:

1 - 25 (50%)

26 - 50 (30%)

51 - 75 (15%)

76 - 100 (5%)

(It's possible these figures might need slightly adjusting, but not by much).

Anyway, the result is definitely not a bell curve. Compare that to say, height or weight - these are bell curves because most of the adult population fall between 4ft 9 and 6ft 7, and 5 stone and 21 stone, which means the bell curve peaks at the average of those ranges and slopes downwards either side with a few rare cases outside of that range. Human intelligence appears not to follow the same patterns as weight and height, even though I think the average member of the public, strewn with democratic and egalitarian aspirations, would like to think differently.

But what makes it an even more interesting phenomenon is that in all likelihood random walk is implicated in many of the exponentially decaying statistics one sees - and even though the intelligence curve isn't symmetrical, it is still possible that a random walk model can account for some of the underlying statistical mechanics.

The general form of random walk arises because parameters and measurements are affected by multiple causes. Take nightclubbing as an example. Suppose in Norwich city centre in 2016 there is a sample group that regularly parties down Prince of Wales Road and averages to the value of n.

If we take a month, say July - each member of that group may go out partying in July. Once the causes that affect people's decision to go out are factored in, we can see many instances where n changes. If a person decides to go out partying, that amounts to a kind of step to the right; that is, it affects n by +1.

However. if a person doesn't go partying in July, that counts as a step to the left - meaning n-1. So assuming all the causes are independent, what we have is something that resembles a random walk-like scenario, hence, partying attendance statistics, when taken over the year, will start to follow a "bell" pattern.

However that won't necessarily be symmetrical, because there may also be exogenous influences at work. For example during certain times of the year, after Christmas, and the subsequent two or three months there will be a bias toward the lower end. Conversely, when it's a hot summer weekend, a bank holiday, or there's a major event in the city, the opposite will happen.

To understand why intelligence is Boltzmannian, not Gaussian, you have to understand that "biased" random walks are highly likely to return non-symmetrical curves. The Boltzmann distribution, which measures frequency distributions of particles over various possible states, arises in atmospheric density with altitude results of random walking molecular motions where there is imposed a maximum energy constraint on the atmosphere (this is due to energy conservation).

If the walk is moving into a space where the density of points in the space varies from place to place one again gets non-symmetry.  So given that human mental resources are limited, it could well be that the intelligence curve is a Boltzmann curve on the leeward side because human mental resources are subject to conservation laws, as well as being 'biased' towards the lower end of the intelligence spectrum - something we don't see in height or weight, which returns the bell curve pattern with the average at the peak of the curve.