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Post by stutefish on Nov 28, 2006 19:29:00 GMT -4
When it comes to defining intelligence, I start with the assumption that it's a critical mass of discrete "signs of intelligence": tool use, time-awareness, self-awareness, etc.; but not requiring every single discrete sign.
And I end with the "powerful space alien" thought experiment. Take "tool use", for example. Taken discretely, one could argue that certain gorillas, with their twigs that yoink ants out of anthills, are also tool users, and therefore should get some credit as "intelligent" by human standards.
But what about powerful space aliens with a bias in favor of tool use as a sign of intelligence? Would they come to our planet, see a species with ant-yoinking twigs and another species with skyscrapers, supersonic jets, microminiaturized transistor arrays, lasers, etc., and be seriously unsure which species represented the significant intelligence on the planet? Would they even rank the two species in the same category, for diplomatic and trade purposes?
Now, if we were visited by powerful space aliens with an art-bias instead of a technology-bias, we might fare a little worse; unless they take a liking to the Brandenburg Concertos, we'd probably find our planet remade as a salon for whales.
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Post by nomuse on Nov 29, 2006 3:20:44 GMT -4
That was one of the fun concepts in the interesting but deeply flawed "Motie" books by Niven and Pournelle; the "Watchmaker" breed were fantastic tool-users but barely capable of independent thought or conscious behavior otherwise. And there was strong suggestion elsewhere in the books that the Moties basically decoupled elements of what we consider "intelligence"; that they were not generalists, but instead bred one to be a good engineer, one to be an artist, one to be a good adminstrator...or one to talk to humans and act intelligent around them!
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Nov 29, 2006 12:31:21 GMT -4
I love The Mote in God's Eye (although the sequel left me cold). The "watchmaker" or "brownies" breed weren't even sentient. They were basically spider monkeys with incredible instinctive tool use abilities. If they really existed they would be an excellent argument against tool use being an indication of intelligence.
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Post by nomuse on Nov 30, 2006 3:38:45 GMT -4
I also enjoyed "Mote" well enough, although I'm glad I skipped the sequel. I have to say (not to get too far off the subject), I like Pournelle okay and Niven is a fine story-teller, but when they combine the results are generally unpleasant. Somehow instead of getting Pournelle's human characters on top of Niven's science, we get Pournelle's Libertarian sabre-rattling on top of Niven's worst rubber science.
Makes one think about other decouplings, though. The tool-using, that is! Computers have been since Eliza on edge of having communication without intelligence. Emotion is also getting harder and harder to pin down a definition for.
My own thoughts are in a different direction; extending the Turing Test if you will; if it is impossible to distinguish an artificial personality from a real person, is it moral to "kill" the artificial personality? Can we maintain ourselves as social animals if we allow ourselves to marginalize creatures that appear to us in all ways to be as human as we are? These questions can only become more pressing as our technology develops even more clever ways to fool our senses....and as we find ways to get a closer and closer understanding to creatures that are not human but may, we find, be "intelligent" in ways we value.
On the flip side, if we maintain an ability to say "This ape is a language-using, future-planning, self-aware tool user, but it is not human and does not have the rights of a human," do we set ourselves up for some future situation where, for instance, we learn what happens organically to make a sociopath and develop an perception of the sociopathic personality as being not exactly human? Already we have the situation of the brain-dead patient, and the severely disabled....and of course legally and morally we have long accepted the doctrine that undeveloped or underdeveloped minds (children or the mentally handicapped or even those with certain organic brain disorders) lose some part of their rights and freedoms for their own good (and ours).
Oh, I do sorry. A long rehearsal and I have moved into complete babble mode. Call this the output of a 1980's natural-language program and ignore the content.....
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