You might like a couple of books by Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" and "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity"
He explores the idea that evolution and thought are the same phenomenon, and that what we call "mind" is ambient.
He explores the idea that evolution and thought are the same phenomenon, and that what we call "mind" is ambient.
I asked my father the very thing I wrote above, and he answered that intelligence was the ability to reuse previously acquired knowledge in a given context. Which would seem fitting, if a bit stretching.