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Article 6481 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: sanelson@milton.u.washington.edu (S. A. Nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Defining intelligence
Message-ID: <1992Jul18.034521.27041@u.washington.edu>
Date: 18 Jul 92 03:45:21 GMT
References: <BILL.92Jul14224037@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu> <1992Jul15.233344.6478@u.washington.edu> <BILL.92Jul16201712@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
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In article <BILL.92Jul16201712@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu> bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs) writes:
>sanelson@milton.u.washington.edu (S. A. Nelson) writes:
>
>   I'm with the Turing-Test crowd in that I think the closest thing 
>   we have to defining "X is intelligent" is "X behaves like me."
>
>If this were true, the sentence "X is far more intelligent than any
>living human" would seem absurd to us. (We would interpret it as
>"X behaves far more like me than any living human".)  It doesn't seem
>absurd to me -- it seems quite correct to say that God, as described
>in the New Testament, is far more intelligent than any living human.
>(God in the Old Testament I'm not so sure about.)
>
>	-- Bill

	Well, religion is mysterious. The God of the New Testament is not
someone you're just going to run into at K-mart, only smarter. God is
interesting because we can't actually rationally concieve of someone that
smart. Arrogant as it sounds, I do think it's absurd (in a philosophical
sense) to speak of something smarter than humans. i.e: we can't make sense
of it. I've never heard anyone but a hippy say "That slug could be much
more intelligent than us. You can tell because it doesn't act anything like
us." And anyway, isn't God considered smarter than us because He acts the
way we're *supposed* to?
					-Sunny Nelson
					sanelson@u.washington.edu


