Sounds crazy but in many ways it is true.

We produce prejudice and bias on a daily basis just based upon the sensory information that we receive every day. These prejudices are made in order to help us determine how the world will play out in the future and consequently how we should act presently. This ability to act in a way that takes into account the consequences of our actions in the future. Our ability of abstraction is based upon prejudice in that for a limited set of information provided our brains will “fill in the blanks” to fit into preconceived notions of how things should look, feel ect. this is how we can recognize a person from seeing the back of their head or part of their face. We cannot see the rest of the person, but we can abstract that the rest of the person is there from biases which we have accumulated.

This may be the basis of intelligence, the ground floor if you will, but is by no means the end all description of intelligence. Higher level intelligence I believe is based upon how we interact with our base level intelligence, what we do with the biases that we have undoubtedly learned and if we are able to recognize and use how our brains have been structured. In this process we must learn that the prejudices we have built up have not been built up for a purpose other then as a function to help us survive in the environment we have been placed. The creation of bias is what allows humans to adapt to the enormous amount of environmental situations we see in the world with ease. However it is often what separates people and creates all the human problems we see in the world.

Such is the nature of our “intelligence.” A word that even we cannot even define with certainty and never will until we understand its true nature. This understanding we will find is the true nature of intelligence to come.