Talking about the relationship between consciousness and intelligence, you have to say first what you mean by consciousness because Richard doesn`t differentiate between the mind-set of thinking, and the mind-set of awareness, and those two  are very different.<br><br>Awareness is like the unfocussed eye, it sees everything and focusses on nothing, and there is no duality of observer/observed or thinker/thought. Thinking involutes this contextuality, and creates the mind-set of modelling, which is "about" reality but is actually the growth of cognition, i.e. representational meaning.  So if Richard is saying that more conscious=more intelligent, that also means more deluded about what consciousness is actually doing !