On 2/14/2013 6:45 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 1:08 AM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
I think you're conflating "intelligence" with "consciousness".
Funny, someone else accused me of the same thing already today:
"You've conflating 'real intelligence' with conscious experience."
Real or literal intelligence is a conscious experience as far as we know.
Metaphorically, we can say that something which is not the result of a
conscious experience (like evolutionary adaptations in a species) is
intelligent, but what we mean is that it impresses us as something that
seems like it could have been the result of intelligent motives. To fail to
note that intelligence supervenes on consciousness is, in my opinion,
clearly a Pathetic Fallacy assumption.
If I move my arm, that is a behaviour. The behaviour has an associated
experience. The behaviour and the experience are not the same thing,
even if it turns out that you can't have one without the other. It's a
question of correct use of the English language.
If the
table talks to you and helps you solve a difficult problem, then by
definition the table is intelligent.
No, you are using your intelligence to turn what comes out of the tables
mouth into a solution to a difficult problem. If look at the answers to a
crossword puzzle in a book, and it helps me solve the crossword puzzle, that
doesn't mean that the book is intelligent, or that answers are intelligent,
it just means that something which is intelligent has made formations
available which my intelligence uses to inform itself.
I meant if the table talks to you just like a person does, giving you
consistently interesting conversation and useful advice on a wide
variety of subjects. Unless it's a trick and there's a hidden speaker
somewhere, you would then have to say that the table is intelligent.
You might speculate as to how the table does it and whether the table
is conscious, but those are separate questions.
Who is to say that that table was actually a TV set in the shape of
a table or a table that had some other means to transmit what would
satisfy a speech-only Turing test? This goes nowhere, Stathis.
How the table pulls this off and
whether it is conscious or not are separate questions.
I think that assumption and any deep understanding of either consciousness
or intelligence are mutually exclusive. Understanding begins when you doubt
what you have assumed.
I think you're using the word "intelligent" in a non-standard way,
leading to confusion. The first thing to do in any debate is agree on
the definition of the words.
Could you define "intelligence" for us in unambiguous terms? I
don't recall Craig trying to do that...
--
Onward!
Stephen
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