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Topic: Intelligence -- what is it?
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James A. Barham
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posted 30. April 2002 17:45
Complex:
A lot of people would agree with you that conscious awareness is required for "true" intelligence (John Searle, for one), but that is largely a semantic issue that I don't see as being very important or interesting (I mean, the way we simply use the word, or the way the man in the street uses the word).
The interesting question, from my point of view, is how to explain the existence of intelligence in the universe. If there is to be any sort of explanation that is continuous with the rest of science, then I think we have to see the case of conscious human intelligence as in some sense growing out of lower-level forms of intelligence. Besides, even in our own bodies we can detect intelligence operating at a preconscious level, in that we are capable of performing voluntarily many actions that can be performed just as well involuntarily (breathing, for instance). Or, say, imagine that you are anaesthetized and that someone puts a match to your hand. I believe that the hand will react intelligently (that is, jerk away from the flame), whether you can feel it or not. [Note added: Perhaps I am wrong about the anaesthetized patient case. Anybody know for sure? Maybe a better example would be a sleeping person.] I just don't see that conscious awareness is the heart of the matter (of course, it is a deep issue in and of itself).
I think the William James definition that Micah S. posted gets to the heart of the matter: the necessary connection between intelligence and goals. The difficult thing is to say what a goal or a value means in terms of science.
In my view, goal-directed striving and intelligent adjustment of means to ends are two sides of the same coin. It is self-evident that rational action requires a goal, but one might also say that the very existence of goals in organisms presupposes intelligence, because what would it mean for there to be goals with no means of ever achieving them? Surely, a perfectly stupid organism, so to speak, is a contradiction in terms.
[ 30 April 2002, 17:52: Message edited by: James A. Barham ]
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Mika Vallittu
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posted 01. May 2002 00:31
complex,
The concept of Intelligence is a very rich notion, and is indeed difficult to define exactly. I want make three points,
First, I think Micah's distinction between real and derived intelligence is a good one. I personally think the most important difference between real and derived intelligence is that derived intelligence lacks the ability the make genuine (free) choices or selections, and therefore derived intelligence cannot induce any new, original boundary conditions on matter. One could call derived intelligence machine intelligence. Real intelligence I would call volitive intelligence. I think human intelligence consist of both machine and volitive intelligences. The volitive intelligence in human beigns is also closely associated with the concept of creativity. Creativity involves effort, tension, and - importantly - a goal. Indeed, we would also need to considers human feeling, desire, planning, intention, agency, and duty. Therefore, the study of intelligence has many dimension alien to analytic, non-telic sciences.
Second, I have argued here previuosly that design or intelligence assumes law or necessity that it manipulates. The law need not be physical law (it might be grammatical, logical, or even moral law). Let me quote myself concerning design and necessity:
quote:
Now, design involves laws and laws are species of necessity. Charles Peirce subdivided Kant's category of Necessity into the laws of logical necessity, physical necessity, and intentional or subjective necessity. As forms of necessity they represent the rules and guideposts that constraint possibility (we might call them the definitory rules of design). It follows that there are then three kinds of designs:
1. Logical design: defined by laws of though or logic.
2. Physical design: defined by laws of nature - physical causality.
3. Intentional design: defined by intentional rules between players.
For example, a mathematical proof or a formal logical proof would be a logical design. Physical designs would include most of biology, especially IC-systems, and all technology based on physics - various machines and tools. Game strategies, like chess-strategies, would be examples of intentional designs. Indeed, all "games" whose rules are based on convention, including baseball or even ethical systems and policies, would embody intentional design.
Third, intelligence probably cannot be adequately understood without studying its close connections with language, sign systems and communication.
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James A. Barham
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posted 01. May 2002 08:13
Mike V.:
I want to make an observation on your last, very interesting, post, and then ask you a question.
First, it seems to me that the very heart of the matter is the relationship between the physical and the intentional or volitional domains (I don't see "logical" as constituting a separate domain from the intentional/volitional---I think it is derivative from the latter, as I explain below). In naturalistic terms, I have stated this as the difficulty in going from the domain of Maupertuis's principle of least action (energy minimization) to the domain of Ockham's razor (rational action). I have stated some of my ideas about how to do this elsewhere, and won't repeat them here. I just wanted to rephrase the main issue, as I see it, to have it on the table.
Now, my question: Do you believe that the gap comes between the human being and everything else lower down, thus looking on all other organisms as mere machines without true volition? Or do you see other organisms---at least the higher ones---as also capable of true intentionality/volition?
If the latter, then how far down the phylogenetic scale are you willing to go? If all the way down to the cell (as I think we must), then how do we cash out the intentional notions of "representation," "symbol," etc. at the level of the cell? Increasingly, molecular biologists are speaking in these terms, but I think they are repeating the same mistake made by cognitive scientists at the level of the brain.
It seems to me there are two very separate problems. One is the problem of volition or conation or striving or value or teleology, or whatever one likes to call it. This is the crucial difference between an organism and a machine which we simply do not comprehend. The other quite distinct problem is the problem of symbolic representation, which I believe only arises out of human language and socially imposed rules. Wittgenstein was right about this, it's just that to avoid social constructivism or some other form of postmodern subjectivism or solipsism, you have to ground human symbol-using intentionality in a lower form of organic non-symbolic, dynamical intentionality. Or so it seems to me.
[ 01 May 2002, 08:19: Message edited by: James A. Barham ]
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Mika Vallittu
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posted 01. May 2002 17:46
James,
Thanks for comments. Here are mine:
James: Do you believe that the gap comes between the human being and everything else lower down, thus looking on all other organisms as mere machines without true volition? Or do you see other organisms -- at least the higher ones -- as also capable of true intentionality/volition?
This is a good question, and I don't claim to know the exact answer.
Consider higher animals like apes, horses or dogs. I think these are not mere machines, but also capable of qualitative experiences such as colors, feelings, smells and the like. On the other hand I think that life, at the cellular level, consists only of "causally closed" machinery.
As far as the question of going from lower to upper level I see two possibilities as most probable.
1. Emergentism: When the complexity of a system is increased enough, the "higher order" properties like feelings, emotions, volition and rational action just somehow "emerge". This is the world view of cyberneticism or systemic reductionism. The detailed nature of this "emergence" remains mystery.
2. Irreducibilism: feelings, volition and language are irreducible elements of reality. Biological organism can take part of these properties or implement them somehow. This position seem to imply some sort of "idealism", meaning that "the real" is the of the mental nature.
If we want to consider these question in more depth we would found ourselves deeply in metaphysics and philosophy.
James: how far down the phylogenetic scale are you willing to go? If all the way down to the cell (as I think we must), then how do we cash out the intentional notions of "representation," "symbol," etc. at the level of the cell? Increasingly, molecular biologists are speaking in these terms, but I think they are repeating the same mistake made by cognitive scientists at the level of the brain.
I agree. At the molecular level we cannot speak of representations or symbols. Symbol always require a consciouss interpreter(s). Within cell there is only causal control.
James: The other quite distinct problem is the problem of symbolic representation, which I believe only arises out of human language and socially imposed rules. Wittgenstein was right about this, it's just that to avoid social constructivism or some other form of postmodern subjectivism or solipsism, you have to ground human symbol-using intentionality in a lower form of organic non-symbolic, dynamical intentionality. Or so it seems to me.
The problem of symbolic representation is indeed of paramount importance. It has been argued, and I agree, that the invention of symbolic language for intercommunication is the most important of achievements of human culture.
There is a field that studies representations - called semiotics - and it has deep connections with both information and intelligence theory. C. S. Peirce offered the most famous classification of representations or signs that might be of interest to readers here (this is from Linguistics 103):
quote:
People who study signs and communication differentiate three kinds of signs: an ICON from an INDEX from a SYMBOL. This distinction is very important and derives from philosopher C. S. Peirce in the late 19th century. The critical issue is to appreciate what a symbol is. This is the key to understanding language and how it differs from any animal communication systems.
The term sign is often used for: icons, indices and symbols. All have a signal aspect, some physical pattern (eg, a sound or visible shape) and a meaning (some semantic content that is implied or `brought to mind') by the signal. But they differ in that icons have a physical resemblance between the signal and the meaning and an index has a correlation in space and time with its meaning. But a symbol is an arbitrary pattern (usually a sound pattern in a language) that gets its meaning primarily from its mental association with other symbols and only secondarily from its correlation with environmentally relevant properties.
Apparently no living nonhuman animals are able to use word-like symbols.
There are, however, some (disputed) claims that a few individual animals (mostly higher primates like monkeys, chimpanzees and gorillas) have been trained by humans to use a small (< 50) inventory of symbol-like units using hand signs or small physical tokens. If this claim is true, it implies a huge divide between humans and nonhuman animals. It means that no animal communication systems can be understood as just 'simple versions of human languages'. This claim is daring and provocative, but probably true. Of course, if one believes that humans are derived from nonhuman animals, then somehow our ancestors must have passed through stages that were intermediate between index-based communication systems -- like dogs, monkeys, bees, whales, etc -- and modern-human symbolic language even though we have very little direct evidence about how this evolution took place.
See: What is a Sign?
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James A. Barham
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posted 01. May 2002 19:45
Mike V:
Thanks for your detailed answer. Now, my next question is:
How do we draw a principled distinction between the intelligence that a dog exhibits in its whole-organism behavior and the seeming purposefulness of the processes that go on inside the dog? Furthermore, how do we draw a principled distinction between the whole-organism behavior of a dog and that of a single cell? Single cells also move in a perfectly rational manner in order to achieve their goals. If the cell is nothing but machinery, then why isn't the dog just a machine? If the dog is more than a machine, if it has true free will, then why doesn't the cell?
I am not saying that the cell's level of intelligence is identical to the dog's. Of course, I believe the dog is more intelligent. Nevertheless, I think that all intelligence rest on the foundation of the sort of rational agency we observe in the cell. In short, the cell is intelligent in a primitive but a quite literal way, and its intelligence is continuous with all the other forms of intelligence right up the scale. Wherever we find purpose, or teleology, there we have intelligence, or so I am convinced. There is simply no such thing as goal-directed action that is purely causal, without some sort of intelligence associated with it, either from the inside or the outside.
BTW, speaking of semiotics, do you the work of the "biosemiotics" school (Copenhagen and Tartu, Estonia)? Their best known statement is found in Jesper Hoffmeyer, Signs of Meaning in the Universe (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996). Given your interest in Peirce, you might be interested to see how they extend Peirce's ideas to lower organisms.
Like I say, I don't buy the semiotic approach myself, because like you I believe that symbols are created by human social conventions. But I do agree with the biosemiotics folks that whatever is going on in humans insofar as our prelinguistic rationality is concerned, that same thing is going on throughout the living world.
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complex
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posted 02. May 2002 01:20
[Note: it would be nice to have a feature to reply to individual posters rather than to the thread as a whole. Perhaps this could be considered by the administrator of Brainstorms]
Several important issues were brought up and I will attempt to address them collectively.
I appreciate seeing all of the collections of definitions by Micah because it gives some insight and contrast into the the two kinds of terms involved in any proposed understanding or definition of intelligence. Some of the terms involved are: understanding, learning, reason, knowledge, reason, think abstractly, comprehension, inventiveness, rational, human-like thought, specification of goals, decisions. On the other hand, the other set of terms involved is very different: behavioral consequence, neural, information-processing capacity, direction (although depending on the meaning of the ambiguity it could fall in the list above: a car has direction and so can a Ph.D. thesis), acting by some set of rules, reaching a goal.
The first set of terms are what we might call “cognitive” references, the second set are what we might call “behavioral” references. The two sets differ from each other as day and night.
In behavioral references, I simply observe the activity that takes place by the said agent. It might or might not have a conscious self, but I don’t care, as long as it performs to specifications. In cognitive references there has to be an understanding involved in a cognitive “I”. Without this “I”, the terms makes absolutely no sense.
These terms also fall in line with what was proposed by Micah: real and derived intelligence. We might say that real intelligence requires the cognitive terms and derived intelligence requires the behavioral terms.
Now the question that I would want to ask is: “is the term ‘derived intelligence’ really a reference to intelligence, or just has the word ‘intelligence’ tacked on for the sake of relating it to its source?”. In other words is it “intelligence, derived from intelligence” or is it “derived from intelligence”. Because its source was intelligence, does not automatically make it intelligent.
To understand this important point, all we have to do is ask ourselves, would we rather be an intelligence, or a “derived intelligence”. Would you rather be a human being or a car? There is obviously no reason to think that “I” would be left if “I” was a car. Yet I would be consoled by being a “derived intelligence” (really meaning derived from an intelligence).
Any reference to behavioural intelligence requires a rational (intelligent?) observation that some system is indeed behaviourally intelligent. The behaviourally intelligent thing does not seem to carry out that observation of its parts as a collective. There is no “I” in the machine. And it is impossible to have a scenario in which an “I” emerges from the parts of a machine, because by linguistic reference, there would be no part of subset of parts that the “I” could refer to.
For those that know it, the Chinese room argument is one of the best illustrations I know of this problem. If people don’t know, someone or myself could repeat it here.
I agree with the point that was made that language must be a part of the reference to intelligence.
As to the point of asking what do SETI observers say about intelligence, I think the answer is not much as they are practical about it. They say, “when we see intelligence, we will recognize it” without saying what “it” is.
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Iain Strachan
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posted 02. May 2002 03:11
One of Micah's definitions of intelligence:
quote:
Intelligent beings find a way to reach their goal, even if circuitous (William James)
Although this cannot be regarded as a full definition, it seems to me that it is especially relevant in the context of intelligent design in Nature, and relates to Behe's notion of irreducible complexity.
If intelligent beings can find goals even by circuitous routes, then it also follows that an unintelligent designer (or "Blind Watchmaker") can only reach goals by the most direct (i.e. the most probable route). The assumption in order to make the evolutionary hypothesis work is that there is a sequence of small steps, each in satisfaction of a short term goal, that can finally give rise to apparently designed objects that we see in nature.
But an unintelligent hill-climbing process can get stuck in a "local optimum". If it needs to get to a better optimum, it can only do so by a circuitous route of first climbing down the hill before going up the next one. This would not be possible in an evolutionary scenario, because the process of descending the hill leads to a decrease in fitness, and the process of natural selection will tend to pull you back up the wrong hill. It is said that genetic algorithms (which are commonly regarded as global optimization techniques) can overcome this by being able to jump out of local minima, either by mutation or by crossover. However it seems to me that this process is only likely to work in low dimensional spaces. If one wants to get from one peak in 100 dimensional space to another, then this possibility of a lucky mutation or crossover is vanishingly unlikely. Imagine that the "basin of attraction" of the global optimum has radius R, and we are at a distance 2R from the global optimum. A lucky mutation or crossover is a random jump. The ratio of the area of a hypersphere of radius 2R to one of radius R in 100 dimensional space is going to be 2^(-100), and hence exceptionally unlikely. There are only two possible ways around this problem:
(1) That the fitness landscape changes (due to changing environmental circumstances), and what was a local peak now opens up a path of ascent.
(2) Adoption of a circuitous route; implying deliberate intelligent action.
If the evolutionary theory is to be justified, then (1) had better be the explanation preferred. However, this also (IMHO) has associated problems. Environmental changes are essentially random changes to the fitness landscape, and we are still left with the problem that a random walk with no long term direction leads to something that looks designed.
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Mike Gene
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posted 02. May 2002 07:03
Complex: As to the point of asking what do SETI observers say about intelligence, I think the answer is not much as they are practical about it. They say, “when we see intelligence, we will recognize it” without saying what “it” is.
But then let's make two changes in your original posting:
If SETI falls under scientific investigation as opposed only to a philosophical, and it is assumed that scientifically, a signal can be described as intelligent, what is a valid definition of "intelligence", understanding of which is a necessary condition for a scientific investigation of design which is intelligent?
Thus, it would seem SETI is not a scientific investigation or the understanding you ask for is not a necessary condition of scientific investigation.
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James A. Barham
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posted 02. May 2002 09:14
Complex:
In a nutshell, my argument comes down to this:
(1) The facts of biology (the patently teleological organization of the activity of the cell) require that we posit a presently unknown, sui generis physics of the living state. There is no other conceivable naturalistic explanation of the facts (once the circularity of Darwinian reasoning is unmasked).
(2) This sui generis physics of the living state will then give rise to the "I" you require for intelligence. But this "I" (which consists of a conative or striving component and a cognitive component---I have sketched an abstract model of these based on F.E. Yates's homeodynamics in my "Biofunctional Realism" paper)---this "I" has nothing whatever to do with language.
(3) In human beings, on top of the immanent teleological "I" that is common to all living things, we also have a socially and linguistically constructed, reflexive, self-aware "I". This second level of "I"-ness, if you will, is what makes us different from all other life forms, but it cannot be understood scientifically without realizing that it piggybacks on the earlier, pan-biological "I".
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complex
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posted 02. May 2002 13:34
James,
I appreciate the summary. I am not touching upon (1). It appears to me that you are talking both about "life" and about "intelligence" at the same time however. You may very well be right about (1), and in fact, I would argue that you are, but I don't believe it has to do with this discussion.
It is (2) that I have a problem in understanding. So let me discuss that before tackling (3).
You say that the parts of an organism gives rise to an "I" that is cognitive and this has nothing to do with language. I am not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean that the understanding of language has nothing to do with the arising of the "I" for its disparate parts or do you mean that the use of language to describe the "I" is not necessary as we can describe the individual parts instead? I would appreciate it if you could clarify this one.
I cannot see how a self-aware, conscious, "I" can simply arise from parts that are each not aware of each other. An "I", on the other hand, is a state of awareness that is not aware of its parts, necessarily.
For example, I may lose my fingernail and not be aware that I have lost it. Or, under, anaesthatic, I can lose a finger or a hand and still not be aware of it. The "I" remains however, and may or may not be aware of the parts under its control. This is observable especially for a baby. It discovers by surprise that this arm actually belongs to it and can do something like throw a spoon on the floor. Even before it does it is aware of itself.
When I say an "I" does not refere to its parts, I mean that you cannot refer to your self-conscious self by referring to any parts in your body. That is how we use language to refer to the self. So saying that this "I" arises from the parts that are moving does not make sense.
For example, which parts do we refer to when we say that this "I" is compassionate or just. If I could refer to specific parts to determine that compassion, then I could also change them to make the "I" more compassionate. So that would be a technological engineering of compassion, love, justice or hate. That gives us insight that no such thing can be done since the parts cannot be engineered to produce those things.
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As to the SETI question, the SETI investigation is only scientfic as a pattern-recognition enterprise. I have a set of patterns in mind before I start and I look for them. If what I observe falls in lines with those patterns I classify it, if not, I dismiss it as noise (whereas it might be a real signal). Those patterns that we look at conform to ourselves and what we think an intelligent person should produce.
The endeavor is not scientific in the sense of observing something that it is not looking for to begin with.
regards,
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James A. Barham
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posted 02. May 2002 23:30
Complex:
On the language issue: All I mean is that I do not feel that intelligence is in any fundamental way connected with the ability to use language. Obviously, everything we think is through the medium of language, but I am a realist, I believe that my linguistic utterances refer to an external world that exists quite independently of me or my thoughts about it. When I say that intelligence is not connected essentially to language, I just mean that the phenomenon of intelligence itself, as it occurs in all living things, exists quite indepedently of human beings and hence of language. We need language to describe it, but it doesn't need us or our language. It exists quite well all on its own without us.
Now, that is my view. What is my justification for it? Well, let's go to the "I" issue to discuss why I think that all living things are endowed with intelligence. Here I want to make a further distinction.
I was really adopting your terminology by picking up the "I" locution, but that is okay, because it succinctly gets at the central point---a coherent and autonomous self that is actively preserved, which is the very essence of life. However, it does threaten to mix up two aspects of the situation that I think need to be kept distinct. Namely, the intelligence or teleology issue, and the qualia or conscious awareness issue.
I do not say that cells are conscious or have subjective experience. I prefer to be agnostic on that issue. I don't say it is inconceivable, but I say we just don't have enough understanding of consciousness and qualia in ourselves to be able to say much about whether it exists or not in other animals. Or, rather, whether it exists in living organisms without brains (I feel pretty comfortable saying it exists in all animals with brains). But I would insist that it is perfectly coherent to conceive of striving even in the absence of subjective awareness. That is all I mean by the "I"---just the coherent global striving of the cell to maintain itself in existence.
Now, if you are willing to allow me to disconnect the "I" in the sense of a locus of the impetus for self-preservation from the qualia issue, then the next step would be for me to ask you this.
Do you consider the dog intelligent? If not, why not? If so, then where do you draw the line. The thing is, brains cannot be crucial for the striving (the qualia are another matter, remember), because the very same behavior is observed in living things all the way down the phylogenetic scale. There is simply no plausible point at which one can draw a line and say: on this side true intelligence, on that side "mechanism." It is either all intelligence or all mechanism. Certainly, the phenomonology is the same all the way down to the bottom. Cells are active, responsive, goal-directed, perceptual systems fighting for survival alongside the rest of us. That much, I submit, is an empirical fact. What we should make of it is, of course, another matter.
[ 02 May 2002, 23:32: Message edited by: James A. Barham ]
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warren_bergerson
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posted 03. May 2002 11:28
James Barham,
I agree with you comments that humans, animals with nervous systems and organisms without nervous systems all exhibit ‘intelligence’. I would go a step further and claim that 1)intelligence can be defined as a process which creates information, 2)it is possible to define a type of mathematical/logical system which creates information and 3)it is possible to demonstrate that intelligence in humans, other organisms with nervous systems, and organisms without nervous systems can all by modeled and explained by such information generating system. Would you care to comment?
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James A. Barham
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posted 03. May 2002 17:37
Warren Bergerson:
On the connection between intelligence and information:
For me, it is absolutely crucial to make a distinction between the information ABOUT a system that we may have as observers versus the information that the system needs and uses in and of itself. In the first, external sense, we can have information about any kind of systems. In the second, intrinsic sense, only living things use information for their own purposes. So we have to be very careful when we talk about the information in a "complex system" without specifying what kind of system and what of information (internal or external) we are talking about.
Now, with regard to living things, considered not as they relate to us as external observers, but rather as they use information for their own purposes, I would not want to say that they "produce" information. Rather, I would want to say that their internal processes are organized in a way that constitutes information.
I have sketched my dynamical model of the meaning of information on Brainstorms before, but let me try to say very briefly how it is supposed to work. (If you want more detail, perhaps we should revert to a private correspondence, not to bore everybody else with repeating all this.)
I view information (in the intrinsic sense) as a relation between a biofunction, modeled using nonlinear dynamics as a nonlinear oscillator, and the external surround to the biofunction. The surround will include certain states that support the continued oscillation of the function (analogous to the way that oxygen supports a candle flame) and others that do not. Information, in my view, is a certain sort of low-energy interaction that acts as a trigger for the functional action and in so doing correlates the action with the "correct" external conditions, so that the oscillator can continue functioning (in dynamical jargon---preserve its dynamical stability).
In short, the idea is this (this is all based on F.E. Yates's theory of "homeodynamics," by the way). The organism (say, a cell) consists of a densely connected network of highly nonlinear oscillators. Each of these oscillators contains a region that is sensitive to the external world and can undergo an interaction with very low energy inputs (in the enzyme, this region is the "active site"). This is a generalized sense organ. Intelligence consists in the fact that the functional action of the oscillator is capable of being corrrelated with the correct external conditions. What makes this physically possible (it is not clarivoyance), is the correlation between the low-energy inputs and those external conditions.
My favorite example is the way we use low-energy photon collisions with our retinas (which do not harm us) in order to correlated our movements through space in such a way as to avoid high-energy collisions (which would harm us). Similarly (I argue), the enzyme uses the low-energy noncovalent interactions at the active site to "know" when to undergo its conformational change. Ordinarily, this will happen in the presence of the correct substrate, because ordinarily the low-energy interactions at the active site will only occur when the correct substrate is also present. However, enzymes can be mistaken. This is the way drugs work---by fooling enzymes by mimicking the correct substrate at the active site (the same thing applies to protein "receptors"). When it turns out that the molecule is not really the right one, however, the functional action fails (the usual high-energy functional interaction cannot go through), and the enzyme loses its dynamical stability and ceases oscillation.
So, to summarize, information in the intrinsic, dynamical sense is a low-energy input for a biofunction conceived of as nonlinear oscillator. The meaning of information in this sense is the prediction of the success of functional action. The informational, low-energy trigger in effect says to the function---if you act now, your goal-directed action will be successful. I submit that this process, considered as a whole---as a model of functional action---is the essence of intelligence. Remember that before we said that intelligence is just the ability to coordinate means with ends. That is what all biofunctions do, and information in the dynamical sense is a crucial component of the process.
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warren_bergerson
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posted 04. May 2002 08:39
James Barham,
Thanks for your comments. You are correct in pointing out that concepts like information and intelligence need to be precisely defined. The approach I use is based on viewing, modeling, and/or analyzing biological systems as logic machines. This involves identifying specific bio-physical mechanisms responsible storage, processing, programming etc. The cell as a logic machine, for example is based on the premise that genes are ‘cell state factors’ and the state or program defining how a cell interacts with the environment is defined by the some type of ‘activate/inhibit’ status indicator.
Given that current knowledge is incomplete, it is at times necessary to hypothesis the existence of certain mechanisms which are necessary to make cell function as a logic machine(or a neuron operate as a more sophisticated logic machine), but the existence or non-existence of these mechanism is always testable.
Given a specific model of how a biological unit operates as a logic machine, it possible to use mathematical concepts to define and analyze information and intelligence. In terms of logic machines, I define ‘intelligence’ as the source of information making up the difference between 1)the information needed to successfully complete a change of state process(survive) and 2)the information initially available and the information available from input sources. [This definition is easier to understand in term of mathematics than in verbal format.]
This definition is useful in identifying small simple increases in information. The intuitive concept of intelligence is generally associated with intelligence creating large chunks of information resulting in design. I can also address the issue of how iterative process produce such chunks of information, but it is useful, in my opinion, to first address the issue of how biological systems viewed or analyzed as logic machines create information.
I think that in general I agree with your description of how information and intelligence operate in biological systems. I think, my approach goes a step further and defines in more details how biological systems use information and the creation of information to achieve the goal of survival.
Again I appreciate your comments and would appreciate the opportunity to discuss the subject in more detail either here, or elsewhere.
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James A. Barham
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posted 06. May 2002 00:10
Warren:
I should perhaps be clearer that I freely acknowledge (1) the tremendous usefulness of reductionist analysis of particular quasi-mechanistic physical and chemical interactions, and (2) the usefulness of the type of functional logical analysis of those mechansitic interactions that you describe so well.
But the question I am mainly interested in is: How can we account for the functional logic of life in naturalistic terms? That is, I would like to be able to go beyond a purely phenomenological description of the functional logic of the cell to arrive at an understanding how such a thing can have arisen to begin with, and also how it can behave the way that it does moment-to-moment. It is one thing to describe the decision points you describe; it is something else to explain how in the world thousands of molecules can be coherently coordinated in the way that they are in the cell.
It is true that the functional logic you describe is necessary to understanding the cell, but it is far from sufficient. Functional logic alone will never tell us how it is possible for mere matter to behave in a rational (that is, intelligent, goal-directed) way in the first place. I mean, according to the ordinary physics we are familiar with, matter does not behave this way all on its own!
There are apparently three possibilties: (1) "chance" generation of complex systems, along with "selection" of ones that just "happen" to possess the power of intelligent striving; (2) design by an external agent in the manner of manmade machines; (3) some sort of intrinsic physics capable of giving rise to the intelligent striving of matter, but which we clearly do not currently understand. I believe that (1) is physically absurd and (2) does not so much solve the problem as beg the question (it posits intelligence outside of nature to explain intelligence within nature).
I have tried to take a stab at saying something constructive about (3) by pulling together bits and pieces from the nonlinear dynamics and condensed-matter physics literatures. Clearly, though, what I have done is no more than a pious hope; it is by no means a real solution to the problem. I would never pretend otherwise. The question is, though, if we eliminate (1), Darwinism, and (2), humanlike design, as possibilities, then what choice have we but to try to investigate (3), the intrinsic properties of living matter? That is, if we wish to truly understand how life is possible, and not just rest content with describing its functional logic.
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