Defining intelligence
Years ago in the prudish 1950s Playboy magazine was pushing back by publishing pictures of nude women. My Dad had a subscription but kept it under his bed. At the time politicians were being challenged to define pornography. They'd say "I can't give you a definition but I know it when I see it".
Porn is hard to define but then again almost everything is hard to define. I take a definition to be a set of statements that applies only to the thing to be defined and to nothing else. When I was a freshman I'd meet with friends in a pub for philosophic discussions. We never really got very far. Soon enough somebody would demand that a term be defined and then we'd try to define it and get so lost in the definition that we'd forget the topic.
Once I was working on a hydro dam with my friend Philip cleaning trash out of a long tunnel with wheelbarrows. At the beginning of the shift Philip grumbled that the drinking water was dusty. I demurred - it can't be dusty - dust has to be dry. And for the rest of the shift we'd argue matter back and forth as we passed in the passage. We never did settle the matter but it was a fun way to pass the day.
I read an interesting article in Noema at https://www.noemamag.com/a-radical-new-proposal-for-how-mind-emerges-from-matter/
It examines how the concept of intelligence has expanded over the years. From my own perspective; once I thought that human intelligence was a sign that we were made by God in his image. That was fine when I was a kid but sort of fell apart when my family got a kitten. The little guy was pretty smart.
I've written about how a paramecium has a very low level kind of cognition. It could swim towards food and swim away from toxins using a pretty simple mechanism. I moved by moving celia to sort of 'row' through the water. If food was detected then the celia on the side away from the food would row faster turning towards the food. Once it was facing the food both sides would row at the same rate. For toxins a similar process would work except that the celia on the side facing the toxin would row faster turning away from the toxins.
I once made a little boat out of stuff fished from the garbage and some electric eyes that would swim towards light. I would say that this was a very low level of cognition but not intelligence.
A venus fly trap can 'count'. The trigger that closes it onto a bug has to be struck twice within a limited time frame trigger the closing.
Once we got the right tools we could study what seemed to the naked eye to be just random stuff turns out to have lots of surprising order.
Deborah Gordon studied ants and discovered that they were amazingly complex in their interactions with each other and the anthill as a whole seemed to have a very high level of intelligence. It could detect opportunities or danger in its environment and respond accordingly. The ants were communicating by tasting each other as they passed.
Beehives work similarly with the addition of a dance 'language' that shows bees in the hive where to go to find nectar.
Jumping up to animal behavior, I once saw an eagle hunting coots and the eagle seemed pretty intelligent. The flock of coots was swimming and feeding and always had one or another looking in all directions and when the eagle came by the one who saw would give a cry and all would dive and the eagle would go away empty clawed. After a while the coots would pop up and resume feeding. The eagle returned and the coots dove under again. This repeated a few times - fairly regularly and then after one pass the eagle returned quickly and caught a coot before it could look around.
This line of thinking leads to the idea that behavior is intelligent inasmuch as it's like human behavior in various degrees.
But then human intelligence is broken into many categories. Can this entity solve novel problems. Is this entity emotionally aware?
Hmmm - where was I before I tried defining intelligence?
In some ways the best way of putting it is "that I know intelligence when I see it" But even that is tricky. I was once loosely associated with a very hi IQ society. I could never afford an IQ test so I could never qualify. One of their ideas was that if 2 people have IQ's that are more than 30 points different then neither could tell whether the other was really smart or really stupid. I felt right at home at their gatherings.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.