> On 28 Nov 2014, at 9:01 am, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 28 November 2014 at 10:56, Kim Jones <[email protected]> wrote: >>> On 28 Nov 2014, at 8:41 am, Kim Jones <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> On 28 Nov 2014, at 8:35 am, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: >>>>> On 26 November 2014 at 22:52, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: >>>>> You need consciousness to develop intelligence, and you need intelligence >>>>> to develop competence. >>>> >>>> IN my humble opinion you don't need consciousness to develop intelligence. >>>> Large parts of our own brains behave intelligently - e.g. processing >>>> visual images - without being conscious. Evolution has developed >>>> (relatively) intelligent behaviour in animals and plants that are probably >>>> not conscious. The immune response is certainly more intelligent (in terms >>>> of keeping the organism containing it alive) than letting diseases kill >>>> it, but I doubt it involves consciousness. >>> >>> Does this mean my Kiwi-designed new $2000 Fysher & Pykel fridge is >>> intelligent? >> I mean, why not call an expensive and highly versatile gadget "intelligent"? >> We already attribute competence to gadgets ("smartphones") and presumably >> the more competent the gadget, the more it assumes qualities and >> capabilities that remind us of ourselves which is probably explicable in >> modal logic. A Universal Machine recognises another UM, clearly. The only >> thing missing is the bad breath, the bad philosophy and the need to whinge >> about everything (presumably Löbian qualities). > > Indeed. Unless you're going to make intelligence out to be something only > humans and maybe a few animals have then you have to admit that some machines > can behave intelligently.
Yes. I have always felt this, even before I learnt what a UM was. I no longer think in terms of Us (humans) and Them (everything else). Assuming the comp theology obviously, this distinction makes little sense. The more you think about it, the more our arrogant severing of our selves from our environment when taking measurements and making observations is our biggest mistake. How different would things be if we had long ago adopted the view that all that really matters is competence, or skill at doing. What really matters in whether the doer be a human or some other machine? Think like a machine. Machines will surely rate their interest in each other via perceived competency levels. Competency means "your ability to use your thinking to interact with your experience in order to survive if not thrive and be happy somehow." Darwin is happy with that. De Bono is happy with that. Bruno is happy with that. I am happy eith that. Nevertheless humans rate each other via the IQ principle which was never designed as a metric for competency, or what we might call, after de Bono "operacy". Operacy is not taught at school. There, they only teach and measure literacy (to be able to read the Bible) and numeracy (to be able to calculate how much to tythe the Church). > Not sure about a fridge but I wouldn't be surprised. But my PC manages to be > quite intelligent some of the time, and I doubt it's conscious, i.e. self > aware, or with an inner narrative, or whatever the definition is at the > moment. > OK, so that makes consciousness truly mysterious and dodgy when you try to account for it via physicalist notions such as material universes containing brains. If you can have intelligence without consciousness then I cannot see what having consciousness adds to being intelligent other than "experience". By Occam, you can eliminate consciousness and still have intelligent entities surviving well. They cannot, however be happy. For that, they must have experience which presumably requires consciousness for self-awareness, or the 2nd-tier Löbian thingy, you know.... K -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
