> It rests on a staunch unwillingness to even consider the possibility that a computational process encode intelligence and reasoning.

You are absolutely right, but it may surprise you that I consider that a feature, not a bug. I firmly hold that intelligence is not a useful term in science nor philosophy. If we want to compare computational capabilities between machines and humans we are better of being specific in what we measure. If we want to measure how well a computer can fool a human in the guessing game, then we don’t need intelligence to describe it, we can (and should) be more accurate in describing its capabilities.

I actually think Gardner was on to something when he described his multiple intelligence model. His only error was using this fraught term to describe his model. He would have had a better theory if he had described it as multiple capabilities or multiple skills (however if he had said that people would have simply reacted with “well, duh!”)

We don‘t need intelligence, this term is only useful if you are trying to prove white supremacy using racist pseudo-science, what you overly courteously described as “uncomfortable discussions”.

I agree the term is not particularly useful, at least in as much as people are unable or unwilling to define it.

In fact, a "favourite" of mine when people downplay AI ability to reason or question whether it should be called intelligence, is to ask them to define those too terms. People usually don't even respond.

But I don't think we quite get away from it, because if you exclude the racists who would be happy to exclude groups of people, the other end of the coin is that a lot of people who wouldn't be willing to do that, still really badly want to draw a line that will always exclude all non-human computation no matter what from being considered intelligent or able to reason.

And the term matters a lot to those people, because of the emotional aspect to seeing humans as unique.