On 26 Nov 2014, at 20:23, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 , Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
> I agree that consciousness is not intelligence.
I agree also.
OK.
> An entity can be competent, without intelligence [...] An entity
can be intelligent, without competence
I don't understand the distinction, but I do know that competence
means having the skill and knowledge to get the job done, so what's
the point of "intelligence"? As far as survival is concerned (and
getting genes into the next generation is the only thing Evolution
is concerned with) Intelligence, whatever you mean by the word,
would be as useless as consciousness. So now you've doubled the
number of mysteries you need to explain, not only do you need to
explain why Evolution invented consciousness you can't even explain
why it invented Intelligence.
You can think of intelligence like a potential, and competence like a
force. Competence would be like the derivative of intelligence. Of
course this is just an image. The idea is that intelligence is what
allow competence to be developed.
> I insist also to distinguish intelligence from competence.
Then please do so. I'm all ears.
I have taught mathematics to mentally handicapped persons. Most look
like they were very dumb, and most did not have any competence in
mathematics. By being very patient, and by letting them use computer
(which were very new at that time), I was able to trig some motivation
and interest among some of them, and realized that those were
intelligent, and than the lack of competence came from their handicap.
I tend to think that intelligence is a natural attribute of universal
machine. They can, in principle, learn everything learnable. But to
develop a competence, which is more like a manifested intelligence,
they need enough memories, and some training or programming.
Sometimes I go farer, and define intelligence negatively: an entity is
intelligent if it does not utter stupidities. This is a *very* large
definition which makes pebbles intelligent (no one has ever heard a
pebble saying a stupidity), but the pebbles is obviously incompetent
(except in finding the shortest path to the ground when being dropped).
In all case the basic idea is that competence is an ability to solve
problem in some domain, and intelligence is the ability to develop
that competence. An old researcher can be very competent in his
domain, but can lack intelligence, as no more being able to augment
its competence, or to develop a new one.
Bruno
John K Clark
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