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Topic: Intelligence -- what is it?
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James A. Barham
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Member # 50
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posted 14. May 2002 19:38
Berthajane:
Sorry if I lapsed into stereotypical thinking (perhaps I did). I just find it striking that so many of the thinkers who are trying to open up the area of a qualitative or post-mechanistic dynamics of the living state are women, seemingly way out of proportion to their numbers in other scientific fields. But maybe it is just a matter that there are a lot more women in the pipeline these days than there used to be.
As for needing to pursue both mechanistic and non-mechanistic explanations, naturally I agree. I do not dispute for a moment the value of everything that has been achieved in biology using linear, mechanistic approximations. But I do dispute that such approximations can ever explain the essence of life and mind---which is normative purpose---and so I am mainly interested in new ideas about how to do that.
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John 3
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posted 14. May 2002 21:35
"I do not dispute for a moment the value of everything that has been achieved in biology using linear, mechanistic approximations. But I do dispute that such approximations can ever explain the essence of life and mind---which is normative purpose---and so I am mainly interested in new ideas about how to do that." James A. Barham
So do you favor non-linear dynamics?
Is non-linear dynamics not mechanistic?
What does it mean to be 'mechanistic'? A causal process?
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Mika Vallittu
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posted 15. May 2002 05:40
I agree with Micah that intelligence assumes both creative and mechanistic element.
I have insisted that intelligence needs always to work with some form of necessity, law or rule. Intelligence manipulates laws in order to to achieve goals and purposes. Without mechanism (or regularity of some sort) intelligence, as we know it, could not exist. The mechanisms I have in mind are not primarily physical (linear or nonlinear), but of more general nature. Like rules, functions, mappings, operations or dispositions.
For example, there exists certain rigid set of formal logical rules that can be applied in deduction (the laws of logic), these rules are so specific that they can be programmed on a computer. Indeed, the whole digital computer industry is based on such a logical system: The Boolean Algebra. But pure logic itself is sterile, it only provides the framework for possibility, it does not tell what should in fact be programmed and for what purpose. Similarly the rules of grammar of natural language do not determine what should be uttered, they only sets out the rules our language should conform to.
Intelligence as I see it involves an interplay between creativity, will, and mechanism. Different theories of intelligence abound, differing on what aspect of intelligence is considered as important.
[ 15 May 2002, 12:42: Message edited by: Mika Vallittu ]
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James A. Barham
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posted 15. May 2002 08:26
John 3:
Here is how I see the situation vis-a-vis the evolution of "causation":
First, in the primeval fireball (if that is what it was) there were primarily purely random, or acausal, quantum phenomena.
With expansion and cooling, you get structuration. With the freezing out of degrees of freedom (AKA "symmetry breaking"), you get the sorts of entities that can undergo quasi-mechanistic interactions. Note that I say "quasi-mechanistic." I believe that pure, Laplacian determinism is a myth, even at the level of ordinary Newtonian mechanics, for reasons pointed out by Poincare. K.G. Denbigh has a wonderful analogy. He says that propagation of causes is like a long steel rod. Over short time spans, the propagation is pretty well determined, just as a short steel rod is pretty well unbendable. But just as mile-long steel rod would whipsaw like a blade of grass, so too over long time spans mechanistic causes propagate chaotically.
Now, I define this quasi-mechanistic form of causation as linearity or one-to-one mapping of causes and effects. This is equivalent to time invariance.
The next step is nonlinear dynamics. Here we have broken time symmetry, because there is a many-to-one mapping ("equifinal" behavior, in the mathematical sense) or a one-to-many mapping (bifurcation behavior) of causes onto effects. This is clearlya necessary, but not sufficient, step toward agency.
The final step is full-blown agency, in which nonlinear oscillators come to be coordinated with the external conditions that support their functional action. I have hypothesized that this must always be by means of a low-energy trigger that is the physical means of correlation---i.e., a generalized sense organ. We can see such triggers already at the level of enzymes.
But be that as it may, clearly rational agency is unique to life, and is a big step beyond nonequilibrium thermodynamics. A cell is goal-directed and intelligent in a way that hurricane is not.
So, in short, I see a series of evolutionary thresholds. At each stage, we have a new form of matter which is capable of undergoing a novel type of interaction. For lack of a better word, we may call these different types of "caustion." See the work of Walter Thirring on the evolution of the laws of nature, in this connection.
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Berthajane Vandegrift
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posted 15. May 2002 11:28
John 3:
Unless there are spirits that actively organize matter irrespective of physics, there must be natural processes, right? This idea that "life breaks the rules" somewhat conradicts our notions of process itself, does it not?
Berthajane: How and who determined that intelligence must act according to the known laws of physics? Why designate anything that might not act according to the known laws of physics as ‘spirits’? Wouldn’t the term ‘spirits’ seem to denigrate anything not acting according to the known laws of physics? How and who determined that “there must be natural process”? If life were to not act according to the known laws of physics, what are the “rules” life would break? And who determined those rules?
Consider two acknowledged examples of mind (or intelligence) interacting with the physical world – the placebo effect and biofeedback. Can these interactions be explained by the known laws of physics?
Warren bergerson: A permanent causal relationship has the form " A always causes B".
Berthajane: Life is full of surprises and exceptions. There are few cases in life where A always causes B.
Warren bergerson: In biological systems, the goal G is always some variation of ‘survive and reproduce’.
Berthajane: Our observation of biological systems has led us to interpret life’s goals and motives as ‘survive and reproduce’. We can’t know for certain any motives but our own. (And we are not always sure of our own.) I have goals and motives beyond ‘survive and reproduce’ (relieving boredom, love, hate, jealousy, curiosity, capriciousness, etc.). I don’t assign such goals to biological systems, but I hesitate to state that ‘survive and reproduce’ are the only goals of living matter.
Warren Bergerson: It can be demonstrated (I believe) that the adaptive paradigm is capable of generating creative solutions. Of more practical interest, is the ability to demonstrate that the adaptive paradigm can explain or simulate known occurrences of creativity, such as the design of the bacterial flagellum.
Bertvan: Am I correct that your adaptive paradigm is a deterministic explanation of intelligent causal action? A deterministic explanation of creativity?
James A Barnham
Sorry if I lapsed into stereotypical thinking (perhaps I did). I just find it striking that so many of the thinkers who are trying to open up the area of a qualitative or post-mechanistic dynamics of the living state are women, seemingly way out of proportion to their numbers in other scientific fields.
Berthajane: I feel terrible that you might think I was accusing you of something. Most of us feel the need to apologize when making a generalization, and I was apologizing for myself. Such apologies do not make the generalization any less valid. I agree that woman scientists seem conspicuous in the development of non-mechanistic science.
[ 15 May 2002, 11:32: Message edited by: Berthajane Vandegrift ]
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warren_bergerson
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posted 15. May 2002 18:38
Bertvan,
To answer your questions in reverse order.
Bertvan: Am I correct that your adaptive paradigm is a deterministic explanation of intelligent causal action? A deterministic explanation of creativity?
Yes. But note the model is deterministic or produces a single predicted result ‘under ideal conditions’. In actual practice, intelligence, at least human intelligence is quite inefficient and produces, as we all know, a rather astonishing array of outputs. It is useful to note that ‘scientific determinism’ is a useful concept in formulating, testing, and applying scientific theories. It is useful in science to be able to predict the path an object takes under ideal conditions. This is not, it should be obvious, the same as knowing or predicting exactly what path the object will take under any and all conditions that may arise.
Many will view a deterministic view or model of creativity as a logical impossibility. To counter this claim it is necessary to demonstrate that 1)known creative events can be duplicated or simulated using only the information available when the first creative event occurred, and 2)demonstrating that the deterministic model can create creative solutions as well or better than creative humans.
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James A. Barham
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posted 15. May 2002 19:18
Berthajane:
Sorry I took your self-exculpation as directed at me! (I must have been feeling half-guilty about my own generalization to begin with, to be so defensive about it.)
Anyhow, now that we have the apologies out of the way, I am glad to know you agree with me that it really is a striking phenomenon, whatever the correct explanation may be.
(BTW, it looks like I may finally have succeeded in ordering a copy of Ho's textbook on Bioenergetics. It wasn't easy! If you are interested in doing likewise, I will gladly walk you through it.)
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complex
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Member # 259
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posted 22. May 2002 08:06
[Boy! Go away for a week and you can’t keep up with the posts. I highlight to the powers that be that it would be of immense value to be able to address specific posts in a thread rather than the tread as a whole]
I apologize to James Barnham, Warren Bergerson, Berthajane Vandegrift, John3, Micah and others – I would love to reply to your posts invidually. But instead I will attempt to add something to all the discussions.
Surveying the posts, it seems we are still skirting around the central issue of consciousness and the “I”. It comes up in the posts but we don’t deal with it head on, assuming it is anciliary to the discussion. But a quick view of the 2 postings of James Barnham shows how it is both can be left out and then dealt with.
James Barnham
"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."
James Barnham
"The crucial point, as I see it, is value. None of these machines or algorithms has any intrinsic tendency to seek answers, because none of them feels problems internally to begin with. They are all nothing more than tools that we have constructed for our purposes. It is we who set the boundary conditions that define the funtional states (the desired outputs). They---the machines themselves---neither know nor care what they are doing. I like to call this the "Rhett Butler Problem". Like Rhett, machines just don't give a damn" .
"Intelligence is not just a matter of following a rule, it is a matter of caring about a given goal state and finding the appropriate actions that will bring it about. Only living matter does this---how, exactly, we do not know. But that it does it is a simple empirical fact. The fact that we can describe the instrumental actions living things take to achieve their goals in terms of algorithms or rules, and then program these rules into computers in order to run simulations of intelligent behavior, has no bearing whatsoever on the issue of what constitutes value (or conation or striving) in the first place. And without intrinsic value , there is no function, no intelligence, no nothing except mechanism---billiard ball physics. So, in this sense, I agree with Berthajane."
---end of quotes---
Both these posts illustrate that what separates mechanism from intelligence is a “caring” or a “giving of a damn”. There has to be a central awareness of a goal and tasks to do to achieve it. The amazing thing is that it is assumed to be available without awareness. It is assumed that one can have a “caring” or a “feeling” without a centralized awareness of what it is that the subject cares about!
In this context, I would like to describe the Chinese room argument proposed by Searle, because either we are not familiar with it or we don’t think it is relevant to this discussion.
The Chinese room argument shows that there is something missing in the algorithmic description of intelligence – as James and Berthajane and others have tried to point out, and as Warren and others may not accept. It also points the finger at the missing item as being a conscious understanding, which must, by argument be something other then mechanical and algorithmic.[Searle propopses, with contradiction, a quatum mechanical mechanism, but we could add nonlinear, cold-fusion, temperatur differential or any other mechanism]
The Chinese room argument goes as follows:
“I am in a closed room with only two windows and I know nothing of Chinese. [This has nothing to do with Chinese but it is about a language I don’t understand. In China, it might be called a German room argument]. Through the window, I am given Chinese written words, one at a time, which look like squiggles and squaggles to me. Yet, I have a rule book in front of me that is an algorithmic equivalent of the perfect mechanical translating machine. I look up the rule book and translate the sqaggles and squiggles into English and put it out the other window. I simply mechanically follow the rules, and out comes the English translation. Now the room itself is performing the task that a goal-directed conscious translator of Chinese to English would perform. However, there is one major difference. There is no understanding of Chinese in the room”.
The experiment points to an important point: there is a recognizable difference between a machine translation and a human translation and yet we expect the same results from both. We believe that understanding of Chinese is crucial to a meaningful translation of languages. This appears to be a contradiction and we are uncertain that such a mechanical translation machine can exist and produce the same results a human with understanding of Chinese. [It is like the old joke of a English to Russian to English mechanical translation of “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” produced “the vodka is good but the meat is bad”!].
There is something fundamental about a unified “understanding” of a concept on the one hand and an attempt to map a functionality to parts of a machine (be it linear or nonlinear, wearing down or self perpetual) on the other, and we are only skirting around the issue if we talk about ever complex mechanical (but deterministic) dynamics interacting with environment or about mechanical algorithms that are not aware or “give a damn” about information that they process.
I cannot as yet see how we can have intelligence without an awareness (an “I”) and an understanding and I believe that any mechanical description fails this.
The other simple way to look at it the from the point of view of the “wholeness” of concepts. I understand what the number “one” means. You understand what the number “one” means. Yet both of us have different neurons, different chemicals, different connections in our brain. Somehow the number “one” does not relate to a given number of neurons in a given configuration because it is not an continuous function. I can slightly perturb neurons and slightly modify them or change their position in a continuous way but I cannot do that to the concept of “one”. I cannot have half a concept of the number “one” or a range of concepts between “one” and something else.
Understanding and/or awareness of goals has to be fundamental to intelligence and a dog certainly has it. I, with James, don’t know the boundary, and I would classify a cell as a clever goal-directed mechanism, with the goal of the mechanism not necessary being encapsulated completely in the physics of the cell. But that would require an external mind because a goal cannot be contained in individual parts.
[ 22 May 2002, 08:14: Message edited by: complex ]
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warren_bergerson
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posted 22. May 2002 14:03
Complex,
You argue that the concept of consciousness is essential to understanding intelligence. While I don’t agree with your conclusion, I think the issue does illustrate a number of interesting points.
First, I am an advocate of the pragmatic or engineering approach to science. Science, from this perspective is the search for ‘solutions to problems’, not the search for absolute truth. From a concept such as consciousness is used in analyzing a phenomena like intelligence if the concept is either necessary or useful.
If I understand your argument correctly, you think that consciousness should be recognized as a component of intelligence because it is the only process or mechanism that can explain ‘perceiving a goal and striving to accomplish a goal’. In effect, you are arguing that purposeful or teleological causation does not occur without consciousness. There are any number of counter-arguments to your position including:
PRECISE DEFINITION- Science deals with terms, concepts and principles that can be precisely defined. The current lack of a logically precise definition, raises questions as to whether is consciousness is an acceptable concept. By the way, the same complaint, lack of a precise definition, can be applied to Darwinian concepts like ‘heritable phenotype trait’ and even selection.
A PRIORI CONDITION- It is not appropriate to impose a priori conditions on how a problem is to be resolved unless you proposing an actual solution. Most, IMO, of the dogmatic roadblocks in scientific analysis arise from claims that ‘It must be done this way.." or "it can’t be done this way..". It seems, the further science is from solving a problem, the more rigid the views on how the problem must or must not be solved.
ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION OF PURPOSE- Although they seem to be out of favor currently, there are ‘mechanistic’ explanations of ‘purposeful, intelligent’ behavior going back to the times of the Greeks. These explanations were developed to explain the fact that although many activities appear to involve ‘striving for a goal’, there is no evidence for ‘backward causation’. A action today can’t be explained or caused by a goal which won’t be realized until tomorrow. The mechanistic explanation, is that today’s activity is actually causes by an ‘expectation of a future result’ rather than the future event.
CONSISTENCY WITH EVIDENCE- Consciousness clearly appears to be associated with human intelligence. But there appears to evidence in nature for other types of intelligence. I would identify ‘nervous system intelligence’ and ‘cellular intelligence’ as forms of intelligence which show no indications of consciousness.
ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION FOR CONSCIOUSNESS- The approach I support suggests that ‘human intelligence’ is actually a form or group or social intelligence. To be effective, such intelligence requires complex communications which might be aided by a phenomena such as consciousness. This would also explain why consciousness does not appear to plan a role in nervous system and cellular intelligence where the same type of communications issues don’t arise.
Again, my comments are not an attempt to resolve the issue of consciousness and intelligence. I am simply trying to point out that the consciousness and intelligence issue is logically similar to many other issues in the ID-evolution discussion.
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James A. Barham
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posted 22. May 2002 17:41
complex:
On the issue of whether "awareness" is essential for "intelligence":
I suspect that a part of the trouble is semantic. We cannot help but use words from the context of human intelligence when thinking about infra-human forms of intelligence, but we have to be very careful about the central definitions and the perhaps unwanted connotations of these words.
You state at one point in your new post that "awareness" = "I". Well, in us it seems to, at least most of the time (there are problems about the autonomic nervous system, sleep, etc.), but I don't think we can assume that that is true for lower levels. But first, we need to define our terms more clearly.
By "awareness," you might mean at least two things: (1) a perceptual or cognitive-like connection between a system and the external environment that helps to mediate goal-directed action so that it is successful. In this way, we might say that an amoeba is "aware" that lactose is present in its environment. But then we might also mean (2) the subjective or qualitative aspect of experience or consciousness or feeling (so-called "qualia"). Must (1) = (2)? I don't see why it should.
There are arguments pro and con here. The argument for equating (1) and (2) is that we clearly experience them together, and lower organisms clearly have (1), so (like us) they must have (2) too.
The argument against equating them is that the only kind of system that we know for sure (from our own subjective experience) that is capable of having (2) is brains. So, when we want to say that a lower-level living system lacking a brain has (2), that is pure speculation. It is hard to know what would count as evidence in favor of it, since we have so little understanding about how our own conscious subjective experience is produced by our brains. Maybe brains are not crucial for (2), but then again, maybe they are. Who knows?
Since we lack good grounds for deciding whether (1) = (2) in organisms without brains, I favor simply admitting that we don't know and leaving it at that. This is not fatal for progress on understanding (1). The two are quite distinct, conceptually. I see no good grounds for believing that they MUST be linked in any a priori sense, and since we have no good grounds for deciding one way or the other whether they are always linked a posteriori, why not just leave (2) to one side and focus our attention on the more fruitful problem, namely (1)?
Besides, consciousness per se does not EXPLAIN anything, anyway. Even if we knew for sure that (1) = (2), it is not as though that would help to understand either phenomenon. On the contrary, it would only compound the mystery! (Of course, that is no reason in itself to deny the connection---if we had to posit the connection on other grounds, then we would just have to accept this unpleasant consequence. But since we don't, why burden ourselves with more unpleasantness than is absolutely necessary?)
Then there is the question of what we mean by "I".
One might mean an "I" similar to the human "I", with the implication of subjective awareness or feeling, but I have just shown that this is both unnecessary and unwise in regard to infra-human life forms. Rather, here the "I" (if one must use the term at all) should simply mean a sort of coherence that transcends inorganic forms of coherence and forms a norm with respect to which teleological action can be judged as successful or unsuccessful. That is, a cell has an "I" in the (limited) sense that it actively strives to preserve itself in existence. There is no necessary implication that there is a subjective awareness of itself accompanying this coherent, goal-directed, intelligent striving.
How can that be, you say? Well, I wish I knew. But different forms of matter have different causal powers, and the form of matter that life is made of (namely, the protein-water-phosphate matrix) clearly has the causal powers we immediately recognize as goal-directed, intelligent behavior. Whether it also has subjective awareness of itself is anybody's guess. If you pressed me, I would have to say that I lean toward some kind of very rudimentary subjectivity there. But I insist that that subjectivity is conceptually distinct from the causal power of the living gel giving rise to the intelligent behavior.
Some causal processes have an "inner" feeling, it seems, and others don't (at least as far as we know). We have no idea at present how to tell the difference (apart from rank speculation about whether the inner feeling is or is not essentially linked to brains). So why not just set the problem of the inner feeling to one side, so we can better focus on the already immensely difficult problem of the normative coherence and the intelligent goal-directed behavior itself?
[ 22 May 2002, 17:50: Message edited by: James A. Barham ]
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complex
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posted 24. May 2002 08:18
Warren and James,
I would like to let you know that I am simply a machine. You are assuming that you are conversing with a person, but in fact, I am a clever university algorithm running on a large supercomputer...
Only kidding of course (or am I?)... ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
Thank you for you wonderful comments both. Both of you have one universal claim in common, which is that we don't have to deal with the subjective experience of self-awareness (consciousness, qualia, etc.) in order to describe intelligence. That intelligent behaviour may either proceed without it or may be described without it (as a superfluous concept to our attempt to understand intelligence)
Since you are making a universal claim, I would like to give only one counter example, and then we can ask if your approach is comprehensive of intelligence.
Since I threw out the concept of self-awareness, and you are both understanding me and make an argument around it, I claim that eventually one term that an "intelligence" without self-awareness cannot deal with is the term "self-awareness" because that is one term that requires an understanding of its meaning rather than a mechanical dealing with it.
So, can we claim that we have a science of intelligence, when any intelligence that we describe cannot be made to deal with what you and I are dealing with in this post? Or at least we believe we can describe it behaviorally in terms of its componets without dealing with the fact that "it" "wants" to tell us that it is aware or itself and of us. When it does, we ignore its claims as scientists.
I say to the dog "good boy Rover!" and he is happy to know that I am referring to him and not to his leg or to his ear or to his kidney or liver.
So, I would like you to give me a technological external description of how we can comprehensively deal with what we call intelligences that will not be able to understand this concept, since either we don't require it for intelligence, or we think it is superfluous to understanding it. And if only self-aware beings (like you or I) understand this concept, then we should not leave an understanding of it out in a comprehensive description of intelligence.
Of course understanding "Self-awareness" is only the tip of the iceberg. We find out in a study of language and locution, that by saying "I" (with means self-awarenss of something other than your parts), we actually imply a universe of other understandings that require it. One of them being of course morality. There is no understanding of morality without an understanding of what it means to be an "I".
If you still think this is not the case, and that we have no need to know when a "machine" needs to be able to use the language of "Self-awareness" correctly, then please describe your position.
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warren_bergerson
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posted 24. May 2002 10:45
Complex,
There are several answers to your question on the role of self-awareness in intelligence including the following:
NECESSITY- You make the claim that self awareness is necessary to morality and intelligence, but you can not demonstrate/prove it. The assertion that self awareness is needed for intelligence is an assumption or belief, not a demonstrable fact or conclusion.
BEHAVIOR- As Turing, I believe, pointed out, all a machine really needs to do to demonstrate self awareness is state or claim that it has self awareness in a convincing manner. There is no way prove/disprove 1)the claim that a machine has self awareness, 2)the claim that other people have the same type of self awareness that I have, or even 3)my own claim that I have self awareness. This by the way, if you are young, have the right type of friends, and enjoy drinking beer,( or if you are a philosopher), is a fun topic to debate.
COMPLEXITY- We know that brains are very complex and powerful computing machines. Far more complex and powerful than existing super computers. My models of human creative intelligence are consistent with these measures of the complexity and power of biological processes. It is possible that self awareness simply involves a level of complexity that we are not yet capable of simulating. One day, when we get a big enough computer with the proper functionality, and we write the proper programs, our computer simulations will acquire self awareness.
COMUNICATION - As I have discussed elsewhere, human or human like intelligence involves complex communications among groups of individuals. [Other animals exhibit human type ‘social intelligence’, but not nearly to the extent that humans do.] In order for this communications to function effectively, the individual must be able not only to send out information or messages, but it must be able to evaluate if the sent message was received. An individual must have the ability to view a message from the perspective of both the sender and receiver. If you expand this capacity, you produce the ability to view and interpret information from many different perspectives. At some point, these multiple perspectives result in the ability of the individual to carry on some rather conversations with himself. This ability to talk to yourself is, IMO, the phenomena we call self awareness. It does, I would suggest, play a key role in human type intelligence, but not in other types of biological intelligence. [Just talking to myself, I wonder if this explanation is testable?]
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mturner
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posted 25. May 2002 20:40
**
Hi everyone;
This topic appears to be on the brink of 'stalling out', and since I have been enjoying it so much, thus far, I hope that I can rejuvenate it with a brief observation.
It seems to me that some confusion exists between the nature of Intelligence and the nature of Knowledge. It is a common error to equivocate the two. In this thread I believe that reference to exogenous, (externally input), deterministic, 'material/physical' intelligence, is not Intelligence at all, but Knowledge. Thus "Big Blue" is a master chess player thanks to Knowledge, not to Intelligence. Knowledge can be quantified, or if you prefer, concretized, reified. Intelligence cannot, because Intelligence is not a 'thing', nor a collection of 'things', nor even a symbolic representation of 'things'. It is a a dynamic.
To conflate this dynamic, this endogenous 'force', 'capacity', 'ability', or whatever, with the concretized accumulation of stored knowledge and/or any new data or information arriving exogenously, is to ignore Whitehead's warning of the fallacy of concretizing the abstract, of turning 'form' into 'substance', and thereby confusing the one for the other.
Intelligence is *what happens* when old knowledge encounters new information, whereby meaning and/or behaviour is changed. That is, when independently generated 'learning' takes place, and new knowledge is created. Intelligence is the ability to learn, and to learn is to change.
Intelligence has 'formal', 'dynamic' existence. Intelligence is, in a manner of speaking, a verb, not a noun. Knowledge has 'substantive' existence. It's strictly a noun, so to speak.
Knowledge is the product of the dynamic of Intelligence, acting upon data and/or upon meaningful information. Intelligence is what invests data with meaning and turns it into knowledge, and knowledge is form. If two atomic particles 'know' how to relate to one another, it is because some Intelligence 'told' them how to do so. They have no choice but to do as they were 'told', and retain their form. But whereas Knowledge is essentially Determinate, (dogmatic, inflexible, prescribed, stuff), Intelligence is essentially Indeterminate, (creative, flexible, informal, activity). Thus the concept of Intelligence cannot be studied apart from the concept of indeterminacy, of Freedom, including, by extension, the concept of Free
Will. (Which, as bertvan pointed out, entails fallibility. That is, intelligence entails imperfection.)
Lastly, just as Intelligence is antithetical to Determinism, (i.e., Necessity), it is also antithetical to Chance, (or randomness, or chaos, or happenstance, or luck, or whatever). Intelligence is the imposition of Form upon the Indiscriminate in order to give it Meaning. Intelligence is active and endogenously generated. Chance, randomness, luck, whatever, is passive, and exogenously imposed. Meaninglessly. There thus exist these three: Chance, Necessity, and Intelligence, and none can abide the others, even though they interact constantly and continuously. Don't you just love trinities?!?!
mturner
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James A. Barham
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posted 25. May 2002 21:53
mturner:
I agree with everything you said about intelligence being verb-like and irreducible to chance and necessity.
However, I am not sure I follow why you wish to insist that knowledge must be noun-like, and can apparently exist independently of intelligence, if I understand you correctly.
I believe that "to know" is a perfectly good verb, and indeed I would tend to use "knowledge" and "intelligence" almost interchangeably, or, perhaps, with intelligence as more of a general capacity of a living system, and knowledge as more of a particular faculty (an ability to interact with the environment in a particular way) at a particular time. But I certainly would not want to say that knowledge (in the true sense) could exist except within a living system. All supposed "knowledge" in externalized form (in libraries, data bases, etc.) is nothing but a bunch of patterns of ink or a bunch of patterns of magnetization in the absence of a living system to interpret the patterns as information. Information in this sense (the semantic sense) is generated out of living process, and whether we call it intelligence or knowledge is not that important, as long as we agree on this point, or so it seems to me.
Nothing much turns on how we choose to use these words, as long as we understand each other. But I suspect that there is a difference of opinion lurking behind your desire to use knowledge in a reified sense. Can you please elaborate a little on how you view "knowledge," so we can explore the difference further? Thank you!
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Berthajane Vandegrift
Member
Member # 272
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posted 26. May 2002 09:17
Choice is an essential aspect of intelligence, as mturner is defining it. Choice plays no role in knowledge. The choices have already been made in his definition of knowledge.
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