If basically everything is intelligent (e.g., incl. rather simple chemistry), does that word mean much then/is it a useful term?
If basically everything is intelligent (e.g., incl. rather simple chemistry), does that word mean much then/is it a useful term?
As usual with these debates intelligence is confused with agency, abstract self-awareness, and subjective human-like consciousness.
Systems can have goal-seeking agency with zero self-awareness. Very simple systems can do this surprisingly well. There's an entire branch of engineering called control theory which has mathematical tools for modelling and building these systems.
Systems can have abstract self-awareness through introspection loops, but no subjective human-like consciousness.
We don't know if a mechanical system can have a subjective human-like consciousness. We likely never will, because there is no objective measurement device for human-like consciousness.
We tend to assume humans have subjective awareness by default, because life would get very complicated it we didn't. But really all we see are behaviours.
Intelligence - which pretty much reduces to pattern recognition and abstraction, and effective modelling of future outcomes from past inputs - is orthogonal to all of these.
Let's let X = "chair", to make my point a little more fun.
Obviously we know what a chair is, use the Potter definition[0]. Everyone has several of them in their houses, offices, and all around. But can you state a well defined definition? Is a table a chair? I can sit on it (I often do), it has four legs, and practically all things we'd consider a chair. Okay, it has no back (usually), but then we got to throw out the stool. It has no back. It doesn't even have to have 4 legs! So what about that stump on the ground? Is that a chair? I think most people would argue through a definition of convenience. Or maybe closer to a cat's definition of "if I fits, I sit."
You can replace X with just about anything and you'll find this ambiguity runs rampant. A cup, a table, cereal, sandwich, a tomato; you name it and I'm sure someone here will point out an instance that makes that definition look a lot fuzzier than you initially thought.
So that really shows us the crux of it all: how well defined is something. That only tells us our ability to distinguish something, though it doesn't tell us how well that thing fits into the category. So the stump is a little chair-like, the table is pretty chair, a stool is usually considered a chair, and that thing I'm sitting on is unambiguously a chair[1]. s/chair/intelligence/g and you have your answer. But the if you needed that last sentence, well, there's two types of people: those that can infer.
All models are wrong, but some models are useful
[0] Incidentally this is also a good definition for explaining RLHF and has all the same problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
[1] Though that doesn't mean it also isn't other things!
Simple chemistry couldn't be considered intelligent- it's basically just falling down a potential energy gradient. It gets more interesting when you implement chemical logic (like transistors) and graphs of molecules that convert between each other, like autocatalytic networks.
Good question. It's a useful but incomplete term. Just like white is incomplete. There are always things to be found more white.
This is pedantic and nonsensical, IMHO. White is well defined as "the lightest color" [0]. There is nothing "whiter than white" in the objective sense. It's also a very common topic in introductions to philosophy in order to define how one makes an apology.
[0] https://www.britannica.com/story/are-black-and-white-colors
Yes, words that label parts of continua are useful, even if they don't have well defined boundaries.
Kind of amazing how simple that fact is and how many arguments are caused by people not realising that it's true.
Here are some examples: town, artery, yellow, loud, tall, kind, woman, road...
Honestly it's hard to think of words that do not exist on a continuum. The exceptions are mostly low level maths/physics things.
Sorry, but if everything is intelligent then why is a word for it even needed like it is used today - stating that intelligence is an intrinsic property of matter, moves the discussion quite a bit, I think, as it changes what we denote there.
Unlike "artery" which certainly isn't every blood vessel or "yellow" that isn't every color.
I'll highlight the gp's point here because it is subtle but important
and I'll add one more point: there's a difference in how people speak colloquially and how words are used by experts. In fact, different groups of experts may use the same word to mean different things (e.g. a mathematician and mechanic both call things "manifolds", yet you shouldn't confuse them). Natural language is highly overloaded (which is a big reason we invented formal languages).A problem with the word "intelligent" is that very few people look to see how it is actually used in different fields like neuroscience, psychology, or machine learning, which all use the word a bit differently, and none of them use it in the way that we use in natural speech.
But I can ask you how "yellow" is the color green. It is certainly some yellow. Definitely more yellow than red is. Even more so, we might argue over if black is more yellow than white or not. Which in some settings black is more yellow than white and in other settings white is more yellow than black. Hell, the fact that you can read this and understand it is clear evidence of both utility and ambiguity. We haven't even mentioned that people may use the same definition but use a word to mark a certain threshold and disagree on that threshold (the root of so many painful to watch arguments).Everything is just a bit fuzzier than you think.
"Intelligence" = vessel or color in your example
There are words that distinguish between types/degrees of intelligence. Basal/proto intelligence applies to cells and bacteria. Somatic intelligence is a level higher at tissue. Superintelligence you've no doubt heard of.
It's true that "intelligence" is general/umbrella and doesn't have much meaning, but more specific terms do exist.
So intelligence is an intrinsic property of matter then? It's not a mainstream view now, but who knows.
I personally don't think it's an intrinsic property of all matter, but an emergent one with interaction specifically. Systems have intelligence, not particles, and to be a system, you must have constituent parts (which may not be intelligent themselves). That's why they say it 'emerges'.
A cell is a system, as is a virus, a tucan, a human and an LLM. They exhibit different levels and brands of intelligence, hence continuum.
That's the popular view among scientists/philosophers/my podcasters, at least, and it makes sense to me!
Yes, I think, emergence is the currently prevailing view.
I was thinking more that something like this:
> any system capable of doing an if-else is intelligent to a certain degree
could probably be getting quite broad in terms of things covered (chemistry, physics), hence making it much more intrinsic.
No, intelligence is a description of behavior, not stuff.
As a crisp example: a newly dead person is almost exactly the same stuff as an alive person, but has no intelligence at all. Not a little less, as the difference in stuff would suggest.
I reckon there would probably still be some if else system going on the body of a newly dead person.
Not parent, but since we discussed in the other thread -- yeah, I think that's a good example of your observation that "intelligence" is broad and means different things depending on the context.
Cognitive intelligence in parent's example dies with you. It's gone. But a molecular biologist might say the cells of your corpse exhibit intelligence for some time after. They die gradually, and they do so according to a script of sorts.
Most human societies claim dominance over “everything else” aka “nature” and in order to do that you need a reason “humans” are different from “nature”
Maybe, but making intelligence an intrinsic property of matter feels like a bold step.
There are other bolder things I've seen recently that are somewhat interesting.
Michael Levin and a few other biologists are wondering if certain combinations of matter are tapping into platonic maths that they use for 'intelligence compute'.
Interesting. I'll have a look - thx.
He gave his talk first on day 2 of the AGI 26 conference
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kQBwtgkHnC4&t=289s&pp=2AGhApAC...
I mean Roger Penrose proposes that consciousness is inside the waveform collapse so…
Many definitions of intelligence and ultimately consciousness rely on fanciful ideas and complex theories