What do we mean when we talk about intelligence—and who, or what, gets counted as intelligent in the first place? In this episode of Hotel Bar Sessions, our co-hosts pull up stools at the bar to tackle the idea of intelligence(s) as a plural, contested, and deeply political concept.

Starting from a working definition of intelligence as the capacity to navigate a domain toward ends, the conversation quickly fans out: human intelligence, non-human animal intelligence, machine intelligence, and even the question of whether rivers, mountains, or viruses might exhibit their own forms of intelligent “fit.” Our co-hosts wrestle with familiar philosophical fault lines—rationality versus embodiment, instinct versus understanding, adaptation versus explanation—while keeping a sharp eye on the troubling history of intelligence as a ranking device tied to exclusion, hierarchy, and power.

Drawing on phenomenology, feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, AI ethics, and everyday examples ranging from crows to chatbots, the episode asks what’s really at stake when we measure, compare, or deny intelligence. Is intelligence best understood as a single scale, or as an ecology of overlapping capacities shaped by bodies, environments, and worlds? And if machines are already intelligent in their own way, what follows for how we understand ourselves?

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers, ideas, texts, etc.:

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior (1942)
• the intelligence of crows
• Stefan DC. Dombrowski, “The Dark History of IQ Tests” (TED Talk)
• Carl Linnaeus, Systema Natura (1735)
• Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983)
• Neurodiversity
• Emotional intelligence
• Social intelligence
• Parshin Shojaee et al, “The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the lens of Problem Complexity” (2025)
• Maria Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception” (1987)
• The Turing Test
• machine intelligence
• Embodied Artificial Intelligence
• Skynet (fictional)
• “Skynet” (not-so-fictional) 
• AI “agentic misalignment”
• The “problem of other minds”
• The “Chinese Room” argument (John Searle)
• Boston Dynamic’s robot dog “Spot”
• machine learning
• AI chatbots and digital companions