Who is truly the smartest person who ever existed?

[Lexicus]

Tbh, if you have a +50 IQ point advance on the rest, they are essentially a different species.

Jesus Christ.

 

[Kyriakos]

He likely didn't have a +50 advance, no.

 

[Patine]

Whenever I Google smartest person, William James Sidis comes up and it says that his IQ was between 200 and 300. Yet when I read his Wikipedia page, their are a lot of disputes about his intelligence and say that many of them were exaggerated and false. Leonardo da Vinci is also cited as the most intelligent person of all time and that is more credible as he has tons more scientific and artistic accomplishments than Sidis. Yet, we will never know how smart he is because they really didn’t have the ability to test intelligence when he lived. Marilyn Vos Savant and Walter O’Brian are also said to have the highest IQ’s but they too are dubious and possibly exaggerated. Einstein seems like a contender as his brain was examined to be thicker in certain areas but obviously IQ tests are not reliable as he scored only 160 which is considered low genius. Finally, I once read that their was a Middle Eastern man who was tested with a more accurate scale that measured 7 types of intelligence and he scored a near perfect 198 out of 200. I forget his name.



Anyway their are so many dubious claims to who is the smartest person to have ever lived and I was wondering if anybody has some evidence on a particular person who may be considered the smartest; not based on IQ scores or accomplishments; but instead quaila or a profound understanding of reality that is higher than any other person. Does anybody have any contenders. Their are no wrong answers. Just provide some proof?

Most people who lived more than 200 years ago have no sensible way of discerning their IQ. And, their is much more to intelligence than IQ, in any case. The question of the thread title is unanswerable in any rational viewpoint.

 

[Kyriakos]

It's not impossible in theory, however. Perhaps in the future the degree of complexity of one's consciousness will be largely measurable. This has no real tie to IQ tests, due to their obvious limitations and direction, but to argue difference in relative complexity doesn't typically produce some noticeable effects would also be false.

 

[Plotinus]

Homo sapiens has always had language. And fire, which hominids have had for much, much longer than dogs and the wheel.

 

[Kyriakos]

But some earlier, hominid-type ancestor, would have existed without language. That'd be the life - particularly for a far more intelligent one ^^
Who knows, maybe such individuals simply unalived themselves, leading to a notably worse trajectory up to and including our own species.

 

[Joij21]

Tbh, if you have a +50 IQ point advance on the rest, they are essentially a different species. And if you are wondering ape-men, you might as well jump off the cliff.
Not even a language being there to allow for some level of communication, you'll eventually get bored of getting a collection of animal hides.

Except IQ is not what separates a species, it's all about sex. More specifically if both you and the other entity in question can do it, produce a child, the child grows up, then they have sex and are able to be fertile and produce a child as well. Mules are infertile therefore a horse and a donkey are not the same species but because they still produced something the two are considered to be extremely closely related.

This is how scientists like to define it by the way, guess they obsess over sex a lot.

 

[Plotinus]

The scientific definition of species is actually a lot fuzzier and vaguer than that. There are plenty of examples where two individuals are classified as distinct species - even distinct genera - and yet they can produce viable offspring (that is, offspring which are themselves fertile). This is particularly the case with plants, with many cultivated crops being the result of inter-specific hybridisation, but there are examples among animals too. For example, canaries have been bred with other pesserines of different genera, and king snakes can produce viable offspring with corn snakes.

So there isn’t really a scientific definition of “species” at all - or, to put it another way, there are a number of competing ones, none of which wholly matches the taxonomies that scientists actually use. So “species” is effectively defined as “whatever scientists say is a species”, which isn’t very helpful but seems to work in practice.

 

[Gorbles]

Also, and I cannot stress this enough: IQ is nonsense (in any real terms beyond pop science). A relatively-vague correlation to pattern-matching and similar strengths does not a foundational case for intelligence make. And that's before we get into the fact that it depends on education, can be weighted by the language(s) involved, and so on.

Source: I have a pretty high IQ, as far as the curve goes. This should be enough to convince enough regulars that it's bunk

 

[Kyriakos]

I fear iq tests are just brought in the thread as strawmen. Doesn't take thought to establish that the differences in types, language and skill-prerequisites (let alone time spent to exercise on tests) render the score inconsequential.
That has nothing to do with the obvious difference in complexity of thought and/or emotion from person to person. It is not explicitly measurable with current tech, obviously, but implicitly due to effects it's there; otherwise you'd need also new tech to secure evidence in establishing you are more intelligent than your dog.
An issue which has interested me since I was a child ( ) was the difference between intelligence you yourself enabled or advanced in yourself, and taking advantage of what was there to begin with, biologically. One has to assume that the latter is by far the most crucial factor, so intelligence (for that reason too) should never be something any sane person brags about (=>they didn't create it). A cutting edge 90s pc is slower than a cutting edge 2023 pc, not due to fault or own merit of the pc itself, but conditions beyond its control (the metaphor also finds use in that various older machines served for a longer time, while newer ones were discarded or replaced=>just being more intelligent is only a small parameter in regards to how you will do in life and can easily end up hindering you).

 

[Lexicus]

from person to person.

you are more intelligent than your dog.

one of these things is not like the other...

 

[Kyriakos]

Maybe you just haven't heard of comparisons of intelligence between species, such as adult crows to very young children; take it from there and try to needle through the non-enigma.

 

[Plotinus]

The intelligence of a species is generally taken to consist in the range and complexity of behaviour that they are capable of exhibiting. So a crow is more intelligent than a slug because a crow can do more things and adapt its behaviour more flexibly to its environment. But it’s hard to say whether a crow or an octopus is more intelligent because although they both have a wide range of behaviour, their behaviour is very different. So “intelligence” is really quite a blunt metric for species, just as it is for individuals. Still, when it comes to comparing the intelligence of one person to another, flexibility of behaviour is only one of the metrics we’d normally consider, I think, so they’re not exactly comparable.

 

[Kyriakos]

The intelligence of a species is generally taken to consist in the range and complexity of behaviour that they are capable of exhibiting. So a crow is more intelligent than a slug because a crow can do more things and adapt its behaviour more flexibly to its environment. But it’s hard to say whether a crow or an octopus is more intelligent because although they both have a wide range of behaviour, their behaviour is very different. So “intelligence” is really quite a blunt metric for species, just as it is for individuals. Still, when it comes to comparing the intelligence of one person to another, flexibility of behaviour is only one of the metrics we’d normally consider, I think, so they’re not exactly comparable.

The ambiguity is fine to take into consideration, but imo insofar as it does not purport or strive to imply there is no difference in intelligence. It is always easier to notice differences when dealing with extremes; people notably quite below average intelligence are documented and require typically customized help specifically due to limited mental abilities.
Personally I think that intelligence doesn't matter that much socially. I was revolted when I had to read the Leviathan for my first year at university, but (iirc the quote is from there) it is true that it is rare to be envious of the other person's intelligence, since they typically think it's not something they lack. I'd add, being used to a different style, that one can never identify (other than as a point, without elaboration) anything more intelligent than theirselves (it's just a projection of theirs and thus not what it supposedly signifies), so in that respect no one needs to worry ^^

 

[Plotinus]

Ah, I think it was Descartes who said that common sense is the mostly widely distributed quality, since everyone thinks they have it to a superlative degree.

 

[Gorbles]

I fear iq tests are just brought in the thread as strawmen.

I mean, I'm not the one who correlated a difference in species to a difference of 50 or more IQ points

 

[Kyriakos]

Gorbles, sometimes I hope you are just trying to be funny
Don't be like some who really need the difference between making a point and being literal to be explained.

 

[Joij21]

The intelligence of a species is generally taken to consist in the range and complexity of behaviour that they are capable of exhibiting. So a crow is more intelligent than a slug because a crow can do more things and adapt its behaviour more flexibly to its environment. But it’s hard to say whether a crow or an octopus is more intelligent because although they both have a wide range of behaviour, their behaviour is very different. So “intelligence” is really quite a blunt metric for species, just as it is for individuals. Still, when it comes to comparing the intelligence of one person to another, flexibility of behaviour is only one of the metrics we’d normally consider, I think, so they’re not exactly comparable.

I would think that on a people level what most people consider to be intelligent is how much the specific behaviors a person does yields value or utility.

Manual labor is considered a dumber behavior because while useful many within the population can do it and so it is not scarce and therefore not valuable.

Being able to perform surgery on the other hand is useful, perhaps even more so because it saves lives, but also scarce as not many are capable of doing so without catastrophic error thus making it incredibly valuable and thereby considered to be the marker of one who is very intelligent.

A sword eater or fire breather might be considered dumber because although only a few can perform without catastrophic error, there's not much value/utility in the behavior other than entertaining others. Though the scarcity value of such entertainment does give it more value than the laborer whereby it would be considered perhaps more intelligent work (Thus is of course a modern western perception whereby entertainers are more valued, in ancient times they would be slaves and the value of such entertainment was therefore expected to be free say for the price of purchasing the slave and therefore such work was dumb work for it was dishonorable slave work)

The philosopher is like the laborer, anyone can come up with philosophical musings (perhaps more because at least laborers need some physical strength but everyone has a mind filled with internal dialogue), they are simply made up ideas of the head with no way of empirically proving them to be true. And none of the ideas have any utility value for greater society most of the time.

 

[Kyriakos]

I don't see how it makes sense to tie intelligence to "value". Very easy to notice why, going the other way around: two people doing the same job won't have the same intelligence.

 

[Plotinus]

What evidence is there for this claim that most people see intelligence in terms of social utility? I don’t think that most people would consider (say) a science teacher to be inherently more intelligent than a theoretical physicist, even though the former is more useful to society and much scarcer, at least in terms of how many people are willing to do it in relation to the number needed. In general there is a shortage of school teachers and a surplus of people with PhDs, but I don’t think that most people would think that people with PhDs are less intelligent than people with teaching degrees.