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Dec. 17th, 2002
"Intelligence"
Define.
Wandering ramble again, probably because I had a ramble from home to work and my mind needed something to do; there were a lot of trees around and I slid around somehow to this question.
When does the borderline of 'instinctive' behaviour reach a boundary such that it means a thing is intelligent. I'm not really thinking of animals here, on any sort of scale. I'm thinking more of the line of plants, bloodcells and to an extent software. Many programs these days contain much vaulted 'intelligence' when all they really have inside them is a greater capacity to deal certain pieces of data and provide responses accordingly. Is that really intelligence or just a few extra hundred lines of coding?
Take your average ill-kept pot plant, lurking in the corner and stretching for the light with it's leaves, is it intelligent? It certainly doesn't seem to want to die, has instinctive behaviour (reaching for the light) can react (in a limited way) and adapt to problems such as a curtain blocking the light and grow around it as it can. Is it intelligent? The behaviour implies it to an extent at least, certainly it's not thinking or reacting at any kind of speed that we can really deal with from our immediate perspective, but at it's own rate of growth and perception - it's still reacting. Like bloodcells fighting against whatever happens to roll into your system, are they intelligent? They react. Or are they just following a set of rules.
If it's about thought, or the much vaulted sentience of life then perhaps its just the scale and speed of such thought that needs to be measured, rather than the lack of it.
But it was just something I was pondering on the way back from home, kept me distracted anyway.
Define.
Wandering ramble again, probably because I had a ramble from home to work and my mind needed something to do; there were a lot of trees around and I slid around somehow to this question.
When does the borderline of 'instinctive' behaviour reach a boundary such that it means a thing is intelligent. I'm not really thinking of animals here, on any sort of scale. I'm thinking more of the line of plants, bloodcells and to an extent software. Many programs these days contain much vaulted 'intelligence' when all they really have inside them is a greater capacity to deal certain pieces of data and provide responses accordingly. Is that really intelligence or just a few extra hundred lines of coding?
Take your average ill-kept pot plant, lurking in the corner and stretching for the light with it's leaves, is it intelligent? It certainly doesn't seem to want to die, has instinctive behaviour (reaching for the light) can react (in a limited way) and adapt to problems such as a curtain blocking the light and grow around it as it can. Is it intelligent? The behaviour implies it to an extent at least, certainly it's not thinking or reacting at any kind of speed that we can really deal with from our immediate perspective, but at it's own rate of growth and perception - it's still reacting. Like bloodcells fighting against whatever happens to roll into your system, are they intelligent? They react. Or are they just following a set of rules.
If it's about thought, or the much vaulted sentience of life then perhaps its just the scale and speed of such thought that needs to be measured, rather than the lack of it.
But it was just something I was pondering on the way back from home, kept me distracted anyway.
