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Article 6565 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: exukjb@exu.ericsson.se (ken bell)
Subject: Re: Defining other intelligence out of existence
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References: <1992Jul8.092458.3088@otago.ac.nz> <1992Jul10.202045.23753@dcs.qmw.ac.uk> <BILL.92Jul14102805@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1992 20:56:28 GMT
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In article <BILL.92Jul14102805@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu> bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs) writes:
>From: bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs)
>Subject: Re: Defining other intelligence out of existence
>Date: 14 Jul 92 17:28:05 GMT

>rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

>   Bill Skaggs writes:
>   >
>   >As a prototype, think of a dog standing in front of a fence, with a
>   >bone on the other side; twenty feet away the fence has a hole.  The
>   >problem is to reach that scrumptious bone; the initial state is the
>   >dog's current position, transitions are movements, and there is a
>   >single goal state, namely the bone's position.

>     Aren't you doing just what the subject line of this article is trying
>   to avoid - namely "defining other intelligence out of existence?" 

>My intention was to do exactly the opposite.  When the dog solves this
>problem, it is showing intelligence.  I don't understand why you say
>this is a homocentric view of intelligence -- it seems completely
>species-independent to me.  The only thing required to speak of the
>intelligence of an entity is that it have goals; the class of
>goal-possessing entities contains a lot more than just humans, doesn't
>it? 


>     I would much rather look at intelligence as something which has evolved.
>   Thus I would measure intelligence in terms of a creature's ability to
>   adapt to a broad variety of circumstances, since surely this adaptability
>   is one of the forces in the evolution of intelligence.

>Well, we already have a perfectly good word for the ability to adapt,
>namely "adaptability".  It seems wasteful to use the word
>"intelligence" to mean the same thing.

>But you've weakened my argument in any case.  I was proposing "the
>ability to solve problems" as a *descriptive* definition of
>intelligence, meaning that I thought this was pretty close to the way
>most people usually use the word.  You use the word differently; if
>most people do, then I am wrong.

>   [ . . . ]

>   With situational intelligence, you are getting closer to the idea
>   of adaptability.  But it is important to remember that the appropriate
>   situations for an alien creature may be totally different from the
>   situations we would use for ourselves.  Thus, if you use problem solving,
>   you may run into the difficult that there is no measuring rod which can
>   measure both human intelligence and alien intelligence.  Perhaps a
>   situation might arise in which we would solve a particular problem to deal
>   with the situation, but our alien might come upon an alternative approach
>   of finessing his way around the situation so that that same problem does
>   not need to be solved.  Who is to say one approach is really more intelligent
>   than the other?

>I agree completely.  Situational intelligence is a set of strategies
>for dealing with particular kinds of problems.  In some cases we may
>be able to say that one strategy is more "powerful" or "sophisticated"
>than another, but it is unreasonable to try to order all strategies on
>a strict linear scale.  In other words, I don't believe it makes any
>sense to look for an "species-independent IQ test".

>Intelligence, abstractly viewed, always involves search and pruning.
>The power of a searching mechanism can be quantified, but no
>interesting problem can be solved by pure search (because of
>combinatorial explosion), so any interesting intelligence requires
>pruning, and there is no general way of quantifying the power of a
>pruning mechanism.

>        -- Bill
I find much that is illuminating in this discussion about intelligence. I 
am sympathetic to doubts about whether we can hit ultimate definitions 
ingeneral; but the question then becomes whether we can proceed without such 
ultimate definitions to guide us.

At any rate, my question: Can there be intelligence without mentality? Or 
do ascriptions of intelligence presuppose the attribution of mind to 
things? That is, is intelligence necessarily and exclusively an attribute 
of mind?  Suppose someone allows that the process of photosynthesis were an '
intelligent' process, perhaps because it seemed goal-directed or had a 
discernable goal-oriented, problem-solving, quality. Since the subject of 
the process is not (obviously) mental, would it make sense to attribute 
intelligence to it?
			(k.b., seriously)
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