Friday, December 01, 2006

Inhuman intellect

In its glorious entirety and brevity, a post from Razib at Gene Expressions (A Science Blogs Joint):
In the post below there is a lot of talk about genius that might rival Newton. I didn't throw down a list of criteria for why I esteem Newton, a lot of this is gestalt intuition anyway, and I'm probably not reflectively totally aware of why I feel the way I do. That being said, someone threw down Aristotle. Instead of Aristotle, or Plato, or any of the other numerous ancients I mentioned Archimedes. Why? Aristotle certainly had, and has, more influence than Archimedes. The reason is simple: Aristotle had superhuman intellect, but Archimedes had inhuman intellect. Aristotle had beefed up hard disk space, lots of RAM and top of the line CPU, but Archimedes had incredible applications that you just didn't see on any other box. Aristotle took the vector that was humanity and extended incredibly across the length and breadth of human space, but Archimedes shifted orthogonally outside of the plane of known space. I believe that Frederick Gauss, Isaac Newton, and their kind were aliens amongst us. While superhuman intellectuals can aid us in accelerating faster across the ocean of the unknown, the unhumans can cast a spell which magically parts the waters and exposes dry land.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing when discussing the intellects of Aristotle and Archimedes, and if not then it's not fair to compare the two.
There are probably as many ways to slice the question as there are reasonably binary pairs, but in this case I'll take theorist vs. engineer. Aristotle was a consummate theorist, someone who thought about how things should fit together. Archimedes, on the other hand, thought about what things could do, and while I think Razib is correct in projecting a perpendicular relationship between the two, I think that perhaps the great difference in direction might have misled him about the difference in the quantity and quality of their intelligences.

1 comment:

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