@etchedpixels @fishidwardrobe @cstross It's at least decently plausible that "intelligence" is "usually correct reflexes about what to ignore as irrelevant".
Attempting to simulate this is often useful (signal processing is a large and productive field) but it's also really difficult to describe as processing layers start interacting with each other and anybody with any knowledge of biology sighs and expects that it's nothing like that neatly separated into layers in organisms.