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Article 6596 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: marky@dip.eecs.umich.edu (Mark Anthony Young)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Defining intelligence
Message-ID: <1992Aug11.152606.25085@zip.eecs.umich.edu>
Date: 11 Aug 92 15:26:06 GMT
References: <BILL.92Jul16201712@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu> <1992Aug8.203153.29752@zip.eecs.umich.edu> <BILL.92Aug9124642@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
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%r bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs)
>marky@dip.eecs.umich.edu (Mark Anthony Young) writes:
>
>   > The appropriate definition for "more intelligent" is:
>   >
>   >  "X is more intelligent than me if X behaves like me, but doesn't
>   >   do all the stupid things I do."
>
>When you put it that way, it's circular, because stupidity is the same
>thing as lack of intelligence.
>
 "Gosh, is it?  Well that was pretty stupid of me.  I guess if I had
  it to do over again, I'd write something different."

Actually, the above definition was offered slightly tongue-in-cheek.  
But having said that, I will defend it from your scurrilous :-) attack.

The definition is not circular, it is merely recursive.  We start with
our first approximation -- "intelligent is me".  Note that I am the sole
judge of what is intelligent.  Something is intelligent to the extent
that it acts like me.  By the same token, something is stupid to the
extent that it acts unlike me.

This definition has the problem that it is impossible for anyone/thing
to be more intelligent than me.  We are going to remedy that problem.

Note that I am (by hypothesis) the measure of intelligence.  But if I
look back at my life, I will see a lot of things that I did that I
wouldn't do again (even under the same circumstances).  It's clear 
that I was not always so intelligent as I am now :-).  Thus we get
our second approximation to "intelligent" -- "intelligent is me-now".

Since intelligence is now defined in terms of how I would act today,
it is possible that I have, in the past, acted in ways that were
"stupid" -- that is, not the way I would do them today (note that this
is only our "second approximation" of stupid).

Now it is possible for me to see that people were actually smarter
than me.  They are the people that I now emulate.  Of course, since
I have taken all the knowledge they have to give me, I am once again
the smartest entity in the Universe.

Now it's a simple matter of turning the crank.  I recognize that I have
been stupid in the past, and therefore that at some time in the future
I may look back at what I am like today and say "Gosh I was stupid."
I recognize that I am fallible, but that I am striving for perfection.
Thus we get our final approximation -- "intelligent is ideal-me".

It is this final approximation that I glossed above as "...like me,
but doesn't do all the stupid things..." and below as "...the way I 
would if...."

>   > That is, it does things the way I would if I'd had more time to
>   > think about them, or that I would do given its example.
>
>This seems pretty close to the mark (no pun intended).  It's not at
>all the same thing as the preceding definition.
>
I hope you see now that they are, if not exactly the same, at least
close to each other.  The trick in the first one is that "like me"
means "like me-now" while "stupid" means "ideal-stupid" -- it's a
change-of-perspective joke.

...mark young


