Higher Intelligence

HI !!! The biggest disappointment for me in the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, as exemplified by the Dover debacle, was the blatant intellectual cowardice (IC) of its proponents. They proposed no great and useful new paradigms to do science with, they just wanted to highlight the element of doubt in the current systems of thought. In a nutshell, they wanted creationism-by-any-other-name.I know what I wanted when I first heard about Intelligent Design. I wanted to see Information Theory move to the center of the science class and build a nice system of thinking and organizing content that could bridge physics, chemistry, biology and psychology. I wanted to have the class ask real questions like What is intelligence? What is lower intelligence? What would higher intelligence be? Could there be such a thing? What would it be like? What could we know about it? How could we get in touch with it? Would it care about us, or would we just be like bugs, only allowed to exist because it isn't quite aware of us? And coming up with real answers to those questions the old-fashioned way, by trying stuff and seeing what blows up.But id wasn't that, not at all. So if we want something like that we are going to have to make it ourselves, starting with what we have. We need a new theory that can supersede intelligent design and incorporate all that fun actual science that ID was sadly lacking. And it needs a nice acronym that recognizes the fact that it is just an introductory specimen that is probably going to have to be able to mutate a lot if it's going to survive even in the lab (HI).The point of view I will be taking is, I think we should have a lot of discussion about stochastic ("random") processes. I think they are the real meat of the question and they are also perfectly suited to provide a framework for studying statistics, mutation, natural selection,and even rocket science. Those are just the sort of thing we are supposed to be learning in this class! But I welcome all viewpoints, I value your contributions, I have good jobs for each of you.My thesis is that the human nervous system is a complex stochastic process; that intelligence appears to be an emergent property of this process at very high (but calculable) levels of complexity; and that evolution itself is also a very complex stochastic process.My theory is that evolution, considered as a stochastic process, is significantly more complex, and therefore at least exponentially more intelligent, than any individual human being.Something that bold ought to be easy to test. Prepare to attack both fore and aft, I will get started fishing for hypotheses rooted in this proto-theory that can make falsifiable predictions. You know the rules, if it is science, it needs to be disproved, improved, and reproved.Is It Science?* If we end up having enough spacetime in the thread I will work on introducing the Doctrine of the Trinity. That's right, into the science class! (I also run with scissors.) Shout out to all Higher Power fans \m/

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

What do you mean by 'intelligence'?

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dictionary.com writes:

quote:

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Intelligence: capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.

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How can evolution have a capacity for learning?

I think you are falsely conjoining two different things here: complexity and intelligence. Yes, the process on evolution may be complex, or seem complex to us, but it does not, in and of itself, own any intelligence. However, in the course of evolution, intelligence might be selected by nature if it confers a survival benefit.Then there is this matter of what, exactly, intelligence is. I wish someone had a way of taking human bias and arrogance out of our attempts to define intelligence. If you put Einstein and Sacajawea in a Manitoba woods to survive on their own, who's more intelligent? Yes, I know, it's all relative. But does technological achievement, including symbolic language, measure intelligence? Theoretical achievement? Or is it the ability to solve problems? An orb-weaving spider has to solve a lot of problems went it builds its web. Humans seem rather slow compared them in our history of engineered problem solving, depending upon how one chooses to define intelligence.”HM

Thanks for your response, that's a very good question!So the first faults that we have found with my little provisional theory are examples of unclear exposition. I believe the correct remedy for this will be to move away from abstract entities like "evolution" and toward more concrete ones like "earth's biosphere." In this direction lies a reasonably impressive edifice called the Gaia Hypothesis. I hope to explore and thoroughly discuss that group of ideas in a post of its own. But I don't think we will be able to just adopt it as is, it doesn't seem to be designed to solve this exact line of questioning. (If the GH did everything we wanted, why would we even be having these discussions at all?) But we will certainly pillage it for any useful booty we can find there.So in the meantime please allow me to beg the question a bit, in hopes of making things clearer or at least not talking manifest nonsense! What we are talking about is life, or life on earth, or even life as we know it; or best of all, some as yet not fully defined entity which includes life on earth / as we know it as a significant component.With this clarification in mind, the theory will be that life (as quibbled above) is itself intelligent, and that evolution is the medium or vehicle through which this intelligence operates. I realize that this is a change to the theory, but I certainly don't want to rename it yet, I'd like to see it take a much harder beating before I send in a substitute. So let's just say that we are using verbal shorthand when we say x is intelligent, we really mean that x is the intelligence of y.This is true in the parallel as well, it's really human beings which are actually intelligent, their nervous system is the medium or vehicle of that intelligence.

If I am, it will be very easy to prove I'm wrong, by providing a model for understanding what we know about intelligence that isn't just chockful of references to very high minimal levels of complexity. Maybe you will want to hold off until I start getting what we think we already know about stochastic process out into play though, that will be another post. Let me know if my clarification post didn't clear this part up for you. Yes, it's very exciting. Let's answer that question, to the best of our ability! Would that be more intelligent though, or more adaptable? And if intelligent, would it be the intelligence of the individual, or some shared intelligence of their race or tribe or culture? And wouldn't that actually be an example of my theory in action, i e wouldn't that "intelligence" you attribute to Sacajawea actually be something larger than her, shared by her tribe, and originating not in her nervous system but rather in the process of evolution, the intelligence of life itself. I agree! Any science of higher intelligence will need to be able to conveniently measure and account for particular aspects or areas where a spider could be seen to be "more intelligent" than a man. For the current line of theory to be any good, that will have to revolve around the complexity of the spider genome and/or nervous system in relation to these specific functions, but with a smaller overall complexity than a human being in those areas in which we appear to excel.This just shines more light on the gist of the theory though. That spider is born with the knowledge to do those things. So they don't so much represent the intelligence of the individual spider, as they do the intelligence of the spider species? They are a result of an intense thinking process that Life itself has had going on, for a long long time, in which some ideas are represented as kinds of bugs. These ideas are very very succesful, they are good ideas. But are they "intelligent"?

The Kreb's cycle is complex, too, so how do you compare its "intelligence" with that of an evolutionary process? Iblis, you are not going to succeed here with a bunch of very alert and articulate scientists when you say things like this. I see a big, red going up the flagpole already.And when you say things like this: I know that there is no point in me sticking around here to give you a free science lesson.Tra la.”HM

I feel ya....Is Gaia supposed to be conscious too?

Well get to it already. Have you learned about superposition? Its instinct. I see them more as robots than having some overarching intelligence.

I wish I understood enough about "instinct" to be able to explain how an orb-weaving spider "knows" how to build its web. I'm pretty sure its mother didn't teach it how to do that, and I know of no spider schools for that purpose. To say that it builds it out of instinct seems to be alluding the question. But I don't have a better idea to replace it. And I don't really know if "intelligence" is part of the explanation. The most plausible answer to this puzzle is that genes hold a kind of collective set of instructions that works as a cascading sequence of signals to solve web-building problems.Somewhere in a spider's makeup there has to be an ability to "decide" where and when to find a branch, add a strand, or make it sticky. Since baby spiders come from sperm and eggs, or sometimes only eggs, that trans-generational ability to build an orb web has to pass through a narrow aperture allowing little more than digitally coded instructions on DNA. Therefore, its "decisionmaking" abilities must reduce to digital arrays of cascading genetic switches, or something roughly in that ballpark.Of course we can always say that the Intelligent Designer, Mother Nature, or The Great Spider of The Woods is the source of such instinctive instructions. But I need a little more than that.”HM.

I think of it with more of an evolutionary assumption.Early spiders presumably didn't have as complex webs as they do now. Assuming the spiders just make random webs, the spiders with slightly more complex webs had a survival advantage over the ones that didn't. This web building ability is passed on genetically. As more and more complexity is added to the structure of the web over generations, more and more advantage is added to their survivability. This could yield very complicated webs that are created randomly from gentic information.The gentic info that they build their random webs (which happen to be very complex) is their instinct.This wouldn't reaquire any intelligence at all.

If spiders are such "robots" as you say, then they must be "programmed" for robotic tasks. And unless there really are mysterious templates, like Sheldrake's morphogenic fields, for spiders to build their webs upon, which I doubt, then said programming must be carried in the genes. We agree on that, and we also agree that evolution put it there.But we may disagree on which organism is more "intelligent" than another. Which species. If you ever happened to watch the ciliate Epidinium under the microscope, you have to ask some hard questions about intelligence and complexity. I couldn't tell you how intelligent they are, although they do remarkable things I can't do, but they are "complex" in a surprising way. These single-celled organisms have mouths, anuses, skeletons, antennae, ecotoplasms, cilia, and so forth. I don't have a single cell in my entire body, excluding extraneous organisms from ambient sources, that is as complex as an Epidinium's.I don't know how to measure "higher" intelligence. I don't think my intelligence if "higher" than Google's, for example, and Google doesn't even qualify as a living organism. Or does it?”HM

Uh-oh.... Quotation marks around a word I don't think they are intelligent at all.I we use the definition of intelligence that I quotes in Message 3, then it requires mental activity.But those quotes around the word show that this isn't realy what you are talking about. No, and it doesn't have any mental activity so it doesn't have any intelligence at all.But again, you seem to be refering to something other than intelligence. I don't really know what it is or how to wrap my mind around it so there isn't much I can discuss about it.

Big Brown’s jockey said after the Kentucky Derby: “He’s a very intelligent horse.” I’ve known dogs that forced humans to have conversations in spelled-out words to avoid being “understood” by them. I’ve known of squirrels that learned to water ski, flatworms that learned to avoid electric shocks, parrots that learned to speak meaningful English.Humans
Chimps
Squirrels
Parrots
Turtles
Sharks
Grasshoppers
Flatworms
Coelenterates
Protists
Archaea
BacteriaCS, please draw a line between two entries on my list that separates the “intelligent” creatures from the rest.”HM

Okay.Humans
Chimps
Squirrels
Parrots
Turtles
Sharks
_____________Grasshoppers
Flatworms
Coelenterates
Protists
Archaea
Bacteria That's just a response to the environment, not an intellectual decision.