Most of what your brain does is statistical reasoning.
Much of the rest is logical inference.
You choose words in the order you choose them because as a child, your mind learned that, statistically speaking, certain words had certain meaning, and when used would engender certain results. All intelligent decisions follow that pattern. Training, comparison to expectations, memorize the difference, adjust behavior, rinse and repeat. Sound familiar?
Most of the intelligent mechanisms within the mind are employed through similar statistical inference, and when it's not done statistically (say, when you are inspired by some flash of 'insight' or when you dream things that have little obvious statistical grounding) there is still some reasoning within the mind that is allowing room for stochasticity to infer intelligence that is statistically calculated to be beneficial, when all other reasoning has failed. Tangentially, it might even be true that the irrational mind is simply one that uses stochastic reasoning more often than is deemed sane by our social norms.
Don't overstate intelligence like it's some amazing technology that we can't understand. Consciousness is more difficult to parlay into a black box model, but intelligence, reasoning, and 'wise' decision making is very much rooted in making statistically beneficial choices and deriving logic from the order we recognize via inductive and deductive reasoning.
If it sounds like I am oversimplifying, please understand that I hold the brain and the amazing parallel processing power it wields in high regard, and it's no mean feat for someone like Einstein, to use an obvious example of great intelligence, to intuit relativistic frameworks using only thought experiments, but his understanding (and everyone else's, for that matter) were built on many, many layers of statistical reasoning.
Much of the rest is logical inference.
You choose words in the order you choose them because as a child, your mind learned that, statistically speaking, certain words had certain meaning, and when used would engender certain results. All intelligent decisions follow that pattern. Training, comparison to expectations, memorize the difference, adjust behavior, rinse and repeat. Sound familiar?
Most of the intelligent mechanisms within the mind are employed through similar statistical inference, and when it's not done statistically (say, when you are inspired by some flash of 'insight' or when you dream things that have little obvious statistical grounding) there is still some reasoning within the mind that is allowing room for stochasticity to infer intelligence that is statistically calculated to be beneficial, when all other reasoning has failed. Tangentially, it might even be true that the irrational mind is simply one that uses stochastic reasoning more often than is deemed sane by our social norms.
Don't overstate intelligence like it's some amazing technology that we can't understand. Consciousness is more difficult to parlay into a black box model, but intelligence, reasoning, and 'wise' decision making is very much rooted in making statistically beneficial choices and deriving logic from the order we recognize via inductive and deductive reasoning.
If it sounds like I am oversimplifying, please understand that I hold the brain and the amazing parallel processing power it wields in high regard, and it's no mean feat for someone like Einstein, to use an obvious example of great intelligence, to intuit relativistic frameworks using only thought experiments, but his understanding (and everyone else's, for that matter) were built on many, many layers of statistical reasoning.