The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> what is "intelligence" anyway?

what is "intelligence" anyway?
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Sunday, January 12 2014, 16:55:55 (UTC)
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...we throw the word around, but what do we think we mean? Are you intelligent when you memorize? Does giving back the answers to a test on a book you read prove you are intelligent?

I'd say the first human to have figured out something, anything, anything new to him, or her, something he had never been confronted with before which involved his having to make an "intelligent" choice, and making it, was intelligent, in the best sense of the word...

A computer, programmed with ONLY intelligent choices and then making the right one, isn't intelligent....it just has been programed to pick the best "intelligent" choice...all the rest, in that particular circumstance, being NOT the intelligent choice.

Are our minds programmed too? Not by Zeus, of course, but by evolution? In a way I suppose so...had my ancestor made an unintelligent choice he might not have survived...but he did and so his mind, in a sense, "programed" mine to make similar intelligent choices.

Can a computer evolve? If a computer could be programed to breed offspring computers, would they eventually evolve into "smarter", or even dumber, computers...or would each be an exact copy? I suppose you could program them NOT to simply replicate themselves, but then YOU would be programming them that way...and we know that human evolution could not work if we replicated exactly...there has to be mutation...there has to be evolution or we'd still be acting like Aprim.

I suppose if computers could breed, randomly, they would produce misfits as well as brilliant offspring, measurably brighter than their ancestors...but I doubt it.

Computers don't have that still unexplainable "spark" of life. We have our own battery...as a computer needs electricity, or some such power, to function at all...I know it's tempting to think computers can be programmed to think.,..but we only have that notion because we've reduced "thinking" to choosing among choices presented to us by our culture...hardly any of us "float" out there, cut off from cultural norms and expectations....

I say, if you can program it, "it" being either a human or a machine, it ain't intelligence in any form I would accept...I don't accept most humans as intelligent, why on earth would I grant that status to a circuit board because it can do what Aprim can?

My favorite definition of intelligence is, "knowing what to do when you don't KNOW what to do". This is more than merely "choosing" what is right from an array of possibilities put in your head...it's even more than just mixing and matching them to come up with something "new". It's that you really don't KNOW what the next move should be...but you come up with it anyway.

It can be said that deep down inside you were busily trying out all possible combinations, already implanted in your brain without consciously knowing it, that nothing "comes from nothing"...I'm getting a headache.....

I guess the safest thing for me to say is that no matter how intelligent a computer may ever seem to be, at its very core and beginning stood a human bean who started it all. Just like at the beginning of the long evolutionary chain which I form a modern link of stood a hairy fellow, afraid of snow, who eventually produced me....there is always some agent who started it all...but, if Dawkins and others scoff at the idea of that having been a god...I'm not sure I want to trade a god for a lab technician who first programmed what became eventually an "intelligent" computer.

We've reduced potentially intelligent humans to "intelligent computers"...not the other way around.



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