Higher Intelligence

Everything that is done by all species is a response to their environment wouldn't you say?In my opinion where the line can be drawn for intelligence, if we had to draw a line, is in the ability to learn from those you interact with, with the conscious awareness that its a benefit to you and that way its something you'd want to pass on to your child(I think its refered to as Memes). As a species gets smarter due to its ability to raise its consciousness, it gives rise to what we refer to as intelligence. In that respect nothing under primate and some domestic animals seem to have this capacity; the capacity to learn with the intent to progress as a whole. In fact it could be argued that nothing under humans actually have full use of this ability. Instinct, as its being refered to in this thread, seems to just be the evolved traits of the species that better help it survive and not necessarily intelligence. Consciousness however, is another issue...

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All great truths begin as blasphemies

So an organism needs to be a chordate to be "intelligent"? How come?”HM

This breaking news about monkeys that can control a robot with their thoughts seems relevant here, because now we have monkeys that can do that, but no human I know has that MENTAL capability. Could those monkeys, as such, be regarded as more "intelligent" than humans?”HM

Actually, from the very article you linked to: So, humans and chimps have the same capability.

Thanks, Perdition. I hadn't read it carefully enough. Now I'm thinking that since such mental gymnastics are not limited specifically to either monkeys or humans the argument for human-only intelligence seems defeated, at least in part.”HM

I like to jump right in in the middle of the deep end and start talking about how the complexity of stochastic processes is a function of the number of pools of random numbers acting as selectors for one another.But that's too fast! Science likes to start with a definition, so I will go ahead and reiterate that in plain english stochastic just means "random"(whatever that means!). Here's that definition again though, in its own special lingo: Stochastic process - WikipediaIsn't that beautiful? Notice that they go ahead and point out (in parentheses, in bold) that stochastic just means "random". Cause otherwise, you, might not be able to tell. From that....So anyway, to get back to the gibberish, when we talk about "complexity" in relation to a stochastic process (alias random stuff aka shit happens nee a series of unfortunate events) we are not just saying something is very intricate, or impressive, or scary, or big. We don't even mean that it's very complicated, though it is. When we calculate complexity for a statistical series we look for how many unrelated contributors are making arbitrary decisions about the other contributors that affect the final outcome and how those decisions relate together, in series and as a network.I however, am going to feel free, to switch back and forth, between one definition of complex and the other, without warning anyone. So feel free to ask which I mean, if I'm still able to talk after they get done punching me for the gibberish preceding.* btw, how do you guys say "processes"? In normal english I would say PRAH SESS iz; but in this conversation I find myself continually thinking of it as PRAW suh SEEZ. Has the demon Enuncio taken over my aftbrain or something? Or is there someone been in the media who likes to sound it out that way that I'm miming without flashing on wtf

Thanks, this is just the sort of stuff I need to be reading up on.
Citric acid cycle - Wikipedia Is it really that complex though? In the sense I tried to grope at in my Spastic post, is there a lot of random selection that ends up amounting to something substantial? The picture doesn't look simple, but corporation org charts are more complex in that sense. Don't bother answering if you don't feel like it though, I am going to keep reading til I can wrap my mind around it. Once I have a plausible retarded answer I will whatever, repeat it incessantly to let you know it's time to attack. That's fine, I'm not supposed to succeed, I'm doing science! I'm supposed to fail fail fail repeatedly. If I'm moving in the right direction, my failures will tend to get less and less horrific as I go along. Eventually, when they seem to have died down completely, that still won't mean I'm right. Did y'all hear that? He called you articulate. Can't even call people that in Congress anymore (though "fucker" is ok as long as you aren't in the main area.) I bet you do But that's just a mental image attached to a figure of speech, its relation to what is happening here is purely figurative. But, I need a free science lesson really bad. It's not for me, it's for the kids!Let me give you some nonsense about what I'm thinking to wack about. Back in the century before last there were some sciences that were sort of milling about, waited to be unified. Let's specify geology, archaeology, and cladistics just for discussion.They were coming up with odd results based on the crap that they had imagined the world to be, and their discoveries started to converge and reinforce one another. Geology said, based on these layers, earth is very very old. Archaeology said, based on what we find in these layers, animals have gotten bigger and more complex over time. Cladistics said, hey, that's the way I happen to like to arrange them myself. This must MEAN something.So they threw a lot of weird ideas of how this all fit together back and forth. Some of them, quite weird, not hard to disprove. Others more substantial. Eventually Darwin won, the sciences united, and we had a revolution in biology and medicine and general civilization techniques that jump right off the scale from the sort of stuff we had been doing immediately before the big synthesis.Now here we are. We have some sciences, which are going to be united and cross-pollinate one another. Let me suggest evolutionary biology on the one side and neurology on the other, the ones I am poking at now. They have things in common, things that resemble one another, about their existing paradigms. This is worth exploring. If we have time, we have another candidate who has this "best described by statistics" thing also going on, which is quantum physics.And that makes 3 !!! Coincidence, or Fact ???

I'm not sure! They sure like to talk like she is, but as of yet I haven't been been able to catch them talking like that, talking about science, and making good sense, all at the same time. Gaia hypothesis - WikipediaWhich doesn't sound all that encouraging even on the "intelligence" side and also seems to be taking liberties with the Anthropic Principle to me.But I'm still reading!Edited by Iblis, : closed a tagEdited by Iblis, : corrected to link to source

Here's that business about random selection again in whatever, the language of love Complex system - WikipediaSo organized complex systems exhibit emergent properties. In one particular stochastic process, the mechanism by which our nervous system works, intelligence appears to an emergent property at a given level of complexity. In another, the mechanism which we call evolution, an emergent property of the process appears to be, you, me us, all those critters and bits of crud. The processes by which our thoughts come into being in our bodies have strong and persistent similarities to the processes by which we ourselves come into being in the world.So from there it's a simple networking question. Can two systems on such totally different scales of being possibly communicate? Or is the one forever doomed to be just a small insignifant part of the other with no way of being heard? Would being heard be a good idea, or would it get us swatted like some kind of bug?* our story so far: I'm a moron, I'm exploring the idea that evolution is the mind of the earth. Or something like that, it will keep changing whenever we try to pin it down. It's science! There are no simple answers, but there are lots of retarded questions.Edited by Iblis, : edited, change "idiot" to "moron" to corrected unwanted connotation

That's very good! Now there in the spider, there seem to be two different instances of intelligence. The one kind is the decision-making process in the spider, in its nervous system. This doesn't seem to learn very much in the individual spider, but its a simple version of the same general sort of electrostatic crud network that our minds are made of.But most of their behavior seems to come hard-wired. Yet it does seem very very intelligent! Now that intelligence is contained in the spider's genome. It passes on from one spider to another. Any learning that took place, is just our way of understanding the process of natural selection and its results. But man does it look like a good engineering education from Spider U!* There's a lovely hippy story about how the same butterflies come back to the same trees every year. But they aren't the same butterflies actually, it's spookier than that. They are the children and grandchildren of the original butterflies! They have never made the trip, they are born knowing the way.Is that just nonsense?

So, are you saying that instinct could represent the learning process of some gestalt intelligence made up of all living organisms?

I might be saying that pretty soon, depending on how things go. Right now I would suggest that the instinct that we find in the individual species would represent the things that they had learned as a species rather than as an individual. Dogs are pretty smart animals, they learn a lot in their lives. But they also come hardwired to know a lot of things that look like intelligent behavior to us.But as for the big quasi-organism itself, no I'm sticking by the idea that not just the instincts of the creatures but also their legs, eyes, fur coats, sharp teeth, and big brains (as applicable) are in some sense the "thoughts" which life is thinking by means of a figurative "nervous system" composed of imperfectly replicating chemical arrangements and educated by a vast array of totally unpredictable events which keep wacking it and wacking it whenever it thinks it's got things worked out. Instinct-in-general might be a key emergent property of its whatsit, though! Or something like that.

It's definitely an interesting argument. I have a degree in Philosophy, and this sounds like the sort of thing I might ponder at 4 in the morning, while staring at the stars. Of course, I'd probably dismiss it as nonsense as soon as I got a good night's sleep. I'm interested to see where this thread goes, though you seem to be talking to yourself for the most part, not many other participants, yet.

Yeah I apologize, uh, my doG ate my whatchallit, the thing that connects me to this website, yeah just this one, last night and uh, I've filled it in now. Sorry for the incovenience, fire at will. Well that's fine, but we don't want to be calling them well-designed robots, that's right out the window! So let's call it a different kind of intelligence, to start with. And see what blows up!I've seen some commentary here to the effect that people who can't understand evolution also don't seem to understand their own thinking process. If they are the same thing, or the same kind of thing, that would make a lot of sense, wouldn't it?

Nope.Well, maybe in a philosophical sense but not in a practical sense.I would divide responses from non-responses (to the environment) by whether or not it was a conscious decision.When I flinch, its a response. When I decide to not eat the cheesecake even though I'm hungry, its not a response to the environment. That's because I've made a conscious decision. That one was particularly against what my response to the environment would be. That's not a bad place to draw it, I guess. Honestly though, its all conjecture (mine too). I would draw it after the awareness for the benefit and before the want to pass it on. Whales and Dolphins. Elephants. Lions. I used to think that but I now believe that non-human animals do have non-zero levels of intelligence. Our's is so exponentially higher that there's seems like zero, but they ehibit some characteristics of intelligence that I would put them at non-zero.Oh wait. You said full use. Hrm. Is our's even full use?