I think I could define general intelligence even in your framing, as a higher-level property of collections of modules. But anyhow, yes, having good intuitions/heuristics for search is a mental module. But it needn’t be one that the AI designed, heck it needn’t be designed at all, or cleanly separate from other modules either. It may just be that we train an artificial neural net and it’s qualitatively better than us and one way of roughly expressing that advantage is to say it has better intuitions/heuristics for search.
I think I could define general intelligence even in your framing, as a higher-level property of collections of modules. But anyhow, yes, having good intuitions/heuristics for search is a mental module. But it needn’t be one that the AI designed, heck it needn’t be designed at all, or cleanly separate from other modules either. It may just be that we train an artificial neural net and it’s qualitatively better than us and one way of roughly expressing that advantage is to say it has better intuitions/heuristics for search.