A Brand-New, Accurate Response
We define “intelligence” as the ability to come up with [to create] a brand-new [completely new], accurate response for each new situation, to never use an old response for a new situation, because a new situation is new, and if you try to use something that worked fine for a previous situation, it’s not going to quite fit the new situation, which never occurred before.
There aren’t any identical entities in the universe—not even two electrons are absolutely identical—and so two environmental situations for a human being will never be exact replicas of each other. There will always be something new.
When we’re functioning on this particular human ability, this flexible intelligence of ours, we’re quite capable of taking in all the information of a situation, comparing it with the information from past experiences that we’ve understood, noting the similarities, noting the differences, putting together a response that is similar to what handled similar experiences in the past but is modified to allow for the differences in this situation, and, being exactly accurate, handling each new situation well.
From page 3 of The Art of Listening
(Present Time 190, January 2018)