Re: [Fis] Fw: INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION: A Charicature. Psychology
Dear Loet, You have opened up what may be an important box, and we need to see if it is Pandora's or Sophia's! Does not your note imply the following questions: 1. Intelligence is a well-defined subject of studies in psychology, but is it a well-defined subject? 2. If intelligence is a well-defined subject of studies, should not this be part of the solution, rather than the problem? 3. Are we to conclude that all we non-psychologists can know is that, with due respect to your wife, psychologists know better what intelligence is? Is there a process view of intelligence in psychology? 4. Since we have more or less agreed that consciousness, information and knowledge are all critical to the understanding of intelligence, do we conclude that psychologists also have appropriate, adequately complex notions of these that we can learn from or contribute to? 5. Thus, are you saying that if we are using an inappropriate paradigm for studying intelligence, psychology is the appropriate one? 6. If so, that is, if psychology is the most appropriate paradigm, what support does it have or require from other disciplines that are relative to point 4 above, especially information? Shall we see where this track might lead? Best wishes, Joseph - Original Message - From: Loet Leydesdorff To: 'Joseph Brenner' ; 'fis' Sent: Sunday, November 21, 2010 10:39 PM Subject: RE: [Fis] Fw: INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION: A Charicature Dear Joseph, It seems to me that part of the problem is that “intelligence” is a well-defined subject of studies within psychology. (I happen to be married with a psychologist.) Perhaps, this is an example of scholars discussing a subject using an inappropriate paradigm. J Best wishes, Loet -- Loet Leydesdorff Professor, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR), Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam. Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-842239111 l...@leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/ From: fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Joseph Brenner Sent: Sunday, November 21, 2010 9:36 PM To: fis Subject: Re: [Fis] Fw: INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION: A Charicature Dear Colleagues, I have just gone back over the discussion of Intelligence and Information to try to extract the major new thoughts and my conclusion is one of frustration. The introduction of the other thread of the fis digest confused me further, since I could not follow its intention or objective. I have thus charicatured the situation as follows: 1. Intelligence has something to do with information, but it is not clear which constitutes the other. 2. It might be possible to measure intelligence, but no-one knows how, or whether it is necessary or desirable. 3. Some lower level biological structures could be considered as displaying intelligence, but the term adds little to the observation of their behavior. 4. Similarly, human beings appear to have multiple capacities that can be characterized as intelligences, but again the term has no explanatory power over and above the biological or cognitive capacities themselves. Perhaps the first conclusion from the above is that all approaches that tend to reify intelligence, to make it a thing rather than a pattern or process should be thrown out at once. We would then agree that intelligence is polysemic, and try to explain how the conceptions differ. For example, a basic question to be answered before looking for the mechanism for the growth of intelligence is if and how intelligence or intelligences change, increase or decrease. Another: what is the relation of intelligence to the process of acquiring knowledge (rather than to knowledge itself) and then, how is this to be differentiated from learning? If someone can produce a real synthesis of the discussion that would completely deconstruct the above I would be the first to applaud it. Sincerely, Joseph ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] fis Digest, Vol 543, Issue 19
Dear FIS colleagues, very briefly stated (ugh, no spare time, devoured by ugly application forms!), I think that quantification as Guy demands can only occur in some small corners of our discussion areas, but not in the fundamental ideas, not well crafted yet. For instance, I take from a recent response of Raquel to Stan the notion of intelligence as the capability to process information for the purpose of adaptation or problem solving activities. In the case of cells, problems can be caused by the environment, extracellular aggressions, communications, etc. Well, we can quantify (and have already done) the portions of the signaling system involved, their correlation with genome size, etc., but have not developed a good conceptual integration of signaling with transcription ---and to my taste nobody as done yet, as signaling means the topological governance of an enormous gene network... I mean, premature emphasis on quantificationmay backtrack and obfuscate on misunderstanding the big picture. I understand Joseph lamentations, but do not share them, as logical clarification of an intrinsically evolutionary phenomenon --without any major discontinuity-- as intelligence is (at least in my view), becomes too big or too daring an undertaking. To make better sense of the evolutionary phenomenon of intelligence, I suggested populational thinking (see msg. below). Now I ad optimality to the mix, meaning the presence or better the emergence of collective principles of optimality that guide the distributed processes by the agent populations participating in the game (roughly, optimization principles running within cells, nervous systems, social markets). And a third ingredient , very subtle one, could be labeled as doctrine of limitation. It refers to consequences of the fundamental limitations of all participants at whatever level to have a complete info on the occurring collective game, or a complete processing capability. In my view, this is the most difficult and consequential point --besides, it directly militates against the God's view we attribute to scientific observer... we already discussed a little bit about this in Beijing! best wishes ---Pedro Guy A Hoelzer escribió: Pedro et al., My previous cautionary post did not get much traction in this thread, but I still think my point was an important one to ensure that we are all talking about the same thing. My point was that “intelligence” in inherently subjective (in the eye of the beholder), unless we can agree on the criterion of performance quality. I think this is necessary if we are to jump from mere information processing (cascades of effects resulting from the input of information to a system) to a notion of “intelligence”. We could, for example, define human intelligence as measured by performance on an IQ test. We could more generally define intelligence in an evolutionary context as measured by the fitness effects of information processing. I am personally not a big fan of either of these criteria. John and Pedro seem to suggest using the degree of “functionality” resulting from information processing as a general criterion. I am intrigued by this option, although I’m not sure how functionality can be measured objectively. I wonder whether this point did not get much traction previously because others disagree, or just don’t think it is important. If my point is both correct and important, then I think we should agree on a sufficiently general performance criterion for the evaluation of intelligence early in this thread. Is there a perspective on “intelligence” that would contradict this point? Regards, Guy On 11/19/10 4:11 AM, Pedro Clemente Marijuan Fernandez pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es wrote: Dear John and FIS colleages, I much agree (below) with the return to the biological; also Gordana and Raquel had already argued along these guidelines. It does not mean that things become very much clearer initially in the connection between information and intelligence, but there is room for advancement. Thus, in Yixin's question, What is the precise relation between intelligence and information?, one of the basic aspects to explore becomes populational thinking --not much considered in AI schools (perhaps very secondarily in the neural networks school. In fact, in all realms of intelligence in Nature (cellular, nervous systems, societies), we find populations of processing agents. In cells, it is the population of many millions of enzymes and proteins performing catalytic tasks and molecular recognition activities --any emphasis in molecular recognition will get short of the enormous importance this phenomenon has in biological organization, it is the alpha and omega (Shu-Kun-Lin has produced one of the best approaches to the generality of this phenomenon). How populations of enzymes achieve an emergent capability of
Re: [Fis] fis Digest, Vol 543, Issue 19
Dear Pedro, I beg your indulgence (3rd note) to make one point: Pedro wrote: I understand Joseph lamentations, but do not share them, as logical clarification of an intrinsically evolutionary phenomenon --without any major discontinuity-- as intelligence is (at least in my view), becomes too big or too daring an undertaking. Such a logical clarification would be undertaken only by a classical logician, not by me, and it would not clarify anything. I am sorry if my caricature implied this. If anything, my logic supports populational thinking and a doctrine of limitation. Thank you and best wishes, Joseph ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] fis Digest, Vol 543, Issue 19
Dear Colleagues, I have some sympathy for Pedro's call for acceptance of a fuzzy definition for intelligence, or perhaps a large set of operational definitions. This is familiar to me as an evolutionary biologist. We treat the concept of fitness exactly this way, and I think both concepts hold great heuristic value even in fuzzy form. My concern under these circumstances is that we have a sufficiently clear definition that it sustains a cogent discussion. If the definition is so fuzzy that disagreements commonly boil down to presumptive differences, then serious discussion is likely to be unproductive. I would personally find it helpful to know what the limitations are on the meaning of intelligence, and what operational definitions are being used when individuals intend to address more narrow definitions. Is it acceptable for a single entity or action to be considered intelligent by one observer and unintelligent by another? Regards, Guy On 11/22/10 9:01 AM, Pedro Clemente Marijuan Fernandez pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es wrote: Dear FIS colleagues, very briefly stated (ugh, no spare time, devoured by ugly application forms!), I think that quantification as Guy demands can only occur in some small corners of our discussion areas, but not in the fundamental ideas, not well crafted yet. For instance, I take from a recent response of Raquel to Stan the notion of intelligence as the capability to process information for the purpose of adaptation or problem solving activities. In the case of cells, problems can be caused by the environment, extracellular aggressions, communications, etc. Well, we can quantify (and have already done) the portions of the signaling system involved, their correlation with genome size, etc., but have not developed a good conceptual integration of signaling with transcription ---and to my taste nobody as done yet, as signaling means the topological governance of an enormous gene network... I mean, premature emphasis on quantificationmay backtrack and obfuscate on misunderstanding the big picture. I understand Joseph lamentations, but do not share them, as logical clarification of an intrinsically evolutionary phenomenon --without any major discontinuity-- as intelligence is (at least in my view), becomes too big or too daring an undertaking. To make better sense of the evolutionary phenomenon of intelligence, I suggested populational thinking (see msg. below). Now I ad optimality to the mix, meaning the presence or better the emergence of collective principles of optimality that guide the distributed processes by the agent populations participating in the game (roughly, optimization principles running within cells, nervous systems, social markets). And a third ingredient , very subtle one, could be labeled as doctrine of limitation. It refers to consequences of the fundamental limitations of all participants at whatever level to have a complete info on the occurring collective game, or a complete processing capability. In my view, this is the most difficult and consequential point --besides, it directly militates against the God's view we attribute to scientific observer... we already discussed a little bit about this in Beijing! best wishes ---Pedro Guy A Hoelzer escribió: Pedro et al., My previous cautionary post did not get much traction in this thread, but I still think my point was an important one to ensure that we are all talking about the same thing. My point was that ³intelligence² in inherently subjective (in the eye of the beholder), unless we can agree on the criterion of performance quality. I think this is necessary if we are to jump from mere information processing (cascades of effects resulting from the input of information to a system) to a notion of ³intelligence². We could, for example, define human intelligence as measured by performance on an IQ test. We could more generally define intelligence in an evolutionary context as measured by the fitness effects of information processing. I am personally not a big fan of either of these criteria. John and Pedro seem to suggest using the degree of ³functionality² resulting from information processing as a general criterion. I am intrigued by this option, although I¹m not sure how functionality can be measured objectively. I wonder whether this point did not get much traction previously because others disagree, or just don¹t think it is important. If my point is both correct and important, then I think we should agree on a sufficiently general performance criterion for the evaluation of intelligence early in this thread. Is there a perspective on ³intelligence² that would contradict this point? Regards, Guy On 11/19/10 4:11 AM, Pedro Clemente Marijuan Fernandez pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es wrote: Dear John and FIS colleages, I much agree (below) with the return to the biological; also Gordana and Raquel had already
