On 26 Nov 2014, at 23:56, meekerdb wrote:
On 11/26/2014 11:23 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 , Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
> I agree that consciousness is not intelligence.
I agree also.
> 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.
> I insist also to distinguish intelligence from competence.
My understanding is that intelligence refers to learning ability and
behavior adaptability to novel circumstances. Competence is being
able to act effectively in a given circumstance, but not necessarily
adaptable to new circumstances. If a pipe breaks a plumber will be
competent to fix it, but if his computer fails he will not be
competent to fix it and he may not be intelligent enough to learn
how to fix it. So intelligence is sort of meta-competence, i.e.
competence at becoming competent in particular fields.
Yes, that is the basic idea. I teach also to young people. Some are
intelligent, but never get competent because they does not study, for
many reason, like being more interested in girls than in math, for
example.
Sometimes intelligence itself can be an handicap for getting the
competence. A stupid student can study the course better than a clever
student, because the clever student want to understand the details,
and get stuck on philosophical question, where the stupid student will
have no problem remembering by heart definition, and training itself
to solve problems, not even seeing that the method assumes a lot. The
clever one will think to the case where the method does not apply, and
get stuck in trying to find a better method, and fail to be able to
solve the problem in the easy case, because he is too much ambitious,
and want a general method, with a proper justification.
A typical case is well illustrated by quantum mechanics. A student
fails his exam in QM because he tried to understand the collapse, and
get stuck on it, where other student just take it as a rule of thumb,
perhaps without even seeing the problem.
Bruno
Brent
Then please do so. I'm all ears.
John K Clark
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http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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