Chapter 2 What Is Human-Like General Intelligence? 2.1 Introduction CogPrime, the AGI architecture on which the bulk of this book focuses, is aimed at the creation of artificial general intelligence that is vaguely human-like in nature, and possesses capabilities at the human level and ultimately beyond. Obviously this description begs some foundational questions, such as, for starters: What is "general intelligence"? What is "human-like general intelligence"? What is "intelligence" at all? Perhaps in the future there will exist a rigorous theory of general intelligence which applies usefully to real-world biological and digital intelligences. In later chapters we will give some ideas in this direction. But such a theory is currently nascent at best. So, given the present state of science, these two questions about intelligence must be handled via a combination of formal and informal methods. This brief, informal chapter attempts to explain our view on the nature of intelligence in sufficient detail to place the discussion of CogPrime in appropriate context, without trying to resolve all the subtleties. Psychologists sometimes define human general intelligence using IQ tests and related instru- ments — so one might wonder: why not just go with that? But these sorts of intelligence testing approaches have difficulty even extending to humans from diverse cultures [HHPO12] [Fis01]. So it’s clear that to ground AGI approaches that are not based on precise modeling of human cognition, one requires a more fundamental understanding of the nature of general intelligence. On the other hand, if one conceives intelligence too broadly and mathematically, there’s a risk of leaving the real human world too far behind. In this chapter (followed up in Chapters 9 and 7 with more rigor), we present a highly abstract understanding of intelligence-in-general, and then portray human-like general intelligence as a (particularly relevant) special case. 2.1.1 What Is General Intelli