[MD] Intellect's Symposium

[Krimel]

[Mark]
By my reckoning the intellect is the processing power located in ones
frontal cortex. Intelligence is how well it is working.  The intellectual
level is the sharing of what comes out of the intellect, by means of
communication.  It is dynamic and firmly rooted to the biological.  One
person does not create an intellectual level unless they are schizophrenic,
maybe.

[Krimel]
Right the level involves sharing of intellectual patterns. In prehistory
those patterns were stored in individual minds and accessed through signs
and gestures. This constricted the growth of the "level." Wetware is not an
especially durable storage medium. 

Writing is an intellectual tool that allowed the level to expand greatly
both in terms of the number of patterns stored and their duration or
persistence in time. Printing expanded access to the intellectual level
through cheaper and easier replication of intellectual patterns. The level
exploded asymptotically during the past century as we developed a series of
tools to improve both storage of and access to intellectual patterns.

But just to take minor issue with what you say above human processing power
is not confined to a single region of the brain. Our intellectual capacity
depends on parallel processing of multiple inputs in various ways. 

For example we have separate regions of the brain that process all five
sense modalities. We have systems that tell us whether that input is good or
bad for us. We have systems for storage and retrieval of past data and using
that data to reduce uncertainty about what comes next. We have emotional
systems and systems for encoding and decoding language. All of these systems
work together in parallel to let us perceive and process input into
intellectual patterns and result in motor output that more or less promotes
our wellbeing.