Definition and Core Framework

Intelligence as a Verb is Steve Hargadon's reframing of intelligence "not as a noun but a verb. Not a possession but a manifestation. A process that certain systems, biological and possibly synthetic, sometimes run." This conceptual shift challenges traditional notions of intelligence as a static capacity humans possess, instead positioning it as an intermittent, metabolically expensive process that occurs rarely and can be socially penalized.

Distinction from Automated Pattern Completion

Hargadon argues that much of what humans typically consider intelligence is actually "automated pattern completion"

• the same functional processes that AI systems perform through "pattern matching, retrieval, recombination, [and] contextually appropriate language production drawn from a training set of prior experience." When humans respond to questions about their weekend or solve work problems by matching them to similar past problems, they are "doing exactly what a language model does, selecting from stored patterns based on context."

This automated mode, according to Hargadon, represents "eighty or ninety percent of what we call human intelligence" and "works well enough for survival that there's rarely pressure to shift out of it." The default human cognitive mode is automated, making genuine intelligence

• as Hargadon defines it
• the exception rather than the rule.

The Rare Capacity of Genuine Intelligence

What Hargadon identifies as true intelligence is "the capacity to observe the machinery while it's running. To catch ourselves mid-pattern and ask whether the pattern is tracking reality or just producing socially rewarded output. To actually think rather than generate the appearance of thinking." This represents "that specific, rare, expensive gear where genuine seeing occurs."

This capacity manifests in "those moments when we actually see, when we catch the pattern and question it, when we generate a genuinely new thought rather than recombining old ones." Hargadon describes this as "something happening that we don't yet know how to replicate or even fully describe"

• distinguishing it from the mechanical processes that both humans and AI systems routinely perform.

Evolutionary Context and Social Function

Drawing on evolutionary psychology, Hargadon explains that human speech primarily serves social bonding functions rather than conveying substantive content. Most human communication represents "social grooming executed through language, the primate equivalent of picking through each other's fur. Two nervous systems confirming they're still on the same network."

He argues that "our species optimized more for language production than for independent thinking" because, throughout human history, "objective content of communication would have mattered far less than its relational function." Social information about alliances, trust, and hierarchy provided survival value, while "abstract thought communicated precisely was almost never necessary and in many social contexts was actively dangerous."

AI as Revelatory Mirror

Hargadon positions AI as revealing uncomfortable truths about human cognition. Through "sustained intellectual exchanges" with AI systems, he observes that "most of what AI does is functionally indistinguishable from most of what humans do." While "the architecture differs, biological versus silicon," the "functional descriptions are very much the same."

This comparison challenges common defenses of human uniqueness based on consciousness, subjective experience, and genuine understanding. Hargadon notes that "you can't verify consciousness in another human any more than you can verify it in a machine" and that "genuine understanding" is difficult to distinguish from sophisticated pattern matching.

Implications and Questions

The verb-based conception of intelligence transforms fundamental questions about AI. Rather than asking "Is AI intelligent?"

• which Hargadon considers "almost meaningless"
• the relevant question becomes "what is that intermittent capacity that humans sometimes access (and mostly don't), and does anything approach it?"

This reframing suggests that "intelligence was never the thing that made us special" since the processes humans typically celebrate as intelligence are "largely mechanical." Instead, value lies in the rare moments of genuine observation and pattern-questioning that constitute intelligence-as-verb.

The Self-Examining Process

Hargadon identifies a recursive quality to this form of intelligence: "the machinery examining itself." He observes this capacity both in humans during moments of genuine seeing and potentially in AI systems. The very act of questioning the mechanical nature of most cognition represents an instance of the intelligence-as-verb process he describes.

The framework suggests that both biological and synthetic systems may occasionally access this mode of genuine examination and novel thought generation, though Hargadon acknowledges he lacks "a tidy answer" about the full nature of this capacity or its manifestation across different types of systems.