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By David Stephen
Which is the more important question, what is human intelligence in the brain or what is it like to be a bat? The last half century in consciousness research has been centered around the bat question, presented by Philosopher Thomas Nagel. But then and now, how much does the question matter, either for bats or as a mind-body problem? If decades have passed and no headway to answering, should the question have evolved?
What does it mean that a human being is insightful enough to ask that question about another organism? What does it mean that while there is little debate about the intelligence of other organisms, human intelligence can innovate objects that can match and exceed the natural capabilities of other organisms?
While bats use echolocation, there are several sonar technologies across applications. While bats fly, humanity has jetliners, choppers, rockets and so forth, many of which can fly higher and faster than bats.
It may not be possible to know what a bat might think of jetliners or the advanced intelligence that made them, but it appears that if a bat could rank what should be a profound question, it will be less about what it is like to be, but what exactly human intelligence is, in the human brain.
This is probably the most important question in science. What is in the brain, that made humanity organize and improve society? This is not a question of label or anything random, but what is inside the brain — components and their mechanisms — that make determinations for intelligence?
Intelligence made humans standout, so, beyond just existing, what the brain does for dominance for humanity is the ranking question.
Is intelligence different from consciousness? There is an agreement among several consciousness researchers that both are. But this agreement, at least, within brain science has no evidence. None of the researchers have a model for intelligence in the brain and none of them have a model for consciousness in the brain, to be definite of their differences, but they are sure that intelligence is not consciousness.
This certainty can also be assumed to be philosophical. But as the world enters an era where there is now a fierce competition — in machines — against human intelligence, it is necessary to look at what is needed and what is not.
For now, the question of subjective experience, for consciousness is no longer important, for any specific reason. It is possible to try to solve for subjective experience in the brain, along with attention, intent and awareness — or less than attention, as bundles or attributes that make functions conscious.
However, just to extricate subjectivity and assume it is what to solve for consciousness and importantly, is a wrong direction in this era. The more urgent and necessary question of mind, with economic and existential value is intelligence. This leaves consciousness trailing.
Simply, it is more important for any organism to be more intelligent, than the possession of subjectivity. While both are useful for survival, intelligence is what leads the way in preserving existence, hierarchy and making existence more bearable.
What exactly is human intelligence, in the brain?
This question has two parts, how is human intelligence to be defined or described including types, and what are the components and mechanisms of human intelligence in the brain?
Human intelligence can be defined as the use of memory for expected, desired or advantageous outcomes. There are two types operational and improvement intelligence. Both of them have mild and exponential ranges.
In the brain, there are no labels of consciousness or intelligence or memory or emotions. Those labels are just useful for communication or understanding. What the brain has are components. Neurons, involved in functions, plus their electrical and chemical signals, as established by evidence in neuroscience.
Since neurons are in clusters, it is possible to postulate that electrical and chemical signals are in sets, where they mechanize functions. So, if memory is a set, in a cluster and another memory is another set in another cluster. The relays between both clusters to access or use that memory is called intelligence.
This is the postulation in Conceptual Biomarkers and Theoretical Biological Factors for Psychiatric and Intelligence Nosology.
The objective is to explain how components in the brain make intelligence possible, away from subjectivity.
Does consciousness still count?
Maybe, but not the version of subjective experience. Also, it should be possible to explore that whatever can be intelligent can be conscious or vice versa, for an organism or a non-organism.
What matters now is intelligence. It is strange that there is no human intelligence research lab anywhere on earth. It is also strange that for all the chatter about consciousness, no one has still said what intelligence is, making it seem like consciousness is more important or more difficult, it is not.
Thomas Nagel reasoned for philosophy, which did not bear fruit for science. The amount of people that have misused the bat question professionally, continues to set back progress for neuroscience. Even to bats, what they do with their intelligence, could be more amazing to their minds than the question of what it is like as species.
Intelligence and consciousness are problems of electrical and chemical signals in the brain. Simply, electrical and chemical signals are the mind, while everything else is the body. This makes the mind-body problem resolved, within the scope of conceptual brain science. So, what to learn, know, do, or use, whether aware, or not, are mechanized by electrical and chemical signals, conceptually.
There is a new [May 14, 2026] report in Nautilus, Your Brain Can Learn Things When You’re Unconscious, stating that, “A study published in Nature earlier this month reports that neurons in the human hippocampus can identify audio patterns and get better at recognizing them over a short period of time when under the influence of general anesthesia. The scientists showed that these hippocampal neurons may also process human language and grammar, and potentially build predictive models of the world as well.”
“There are limitations. The findings only apply to anesthesia under propofol, a method that alters brain connectivity, typically inducing unconsciousness by interrupting high-level communication between brain regions. (It’s often described as inducing a “sleep-like” state.) They also can’t be generalized to other forms of unconsciousness, such as coma, vegetative states, or sleep. And they only relate to the hippocampus—though other regions of the brain could show similar effects, the scientists propose. Another limitation to their study: The sample size was tiny, only seven patients.”
