Intelligence (Origins)

by dhw, Monday, March 04, 2013, 12:51 (4280 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: Responses do not require anything, they can be purely chemical in nature, like mixing bleach and ammonia. [...] To invent, solve, or exploit however are drastically different in kind. All three of these processes are creative in nature, and by their nature, imaginative. In other words, in order for any of those three processes to happen, the intelligence must perceive a situation that does not exist yet in order to plan for it pre-emptively.-It depends what sort of response we're talking about. I'm a primate living in trees; suddenly there's a dramatic change in my particular part of the world, and all the trees disappear. Or I live in an endless ocean, and suddenly the water recedes and there is land to walk on, oxygen in the air. The former scenario DEMANDS an innovative response; the latter situation ALLOWS FOR an innovative response. These are typical, new and real scenarios which I am suggesting have driven cells to innovate, thereby causing evolution to advance. Of course innovation is creative by definition, but in the evolutionary context, not pre-emptive.
 
DHW: I'd like to avoid "self-aware" for reasons already given, but I'd regard all this as tantamount to "a reasoned judgement", and the description I have given includes perceiving, learning, reasoning, making decisions...We know that cells do function, and that they do adapt. I am going one step further, and suggesting that these qualities also enable them to innovate.-TONY: You can not do any of these functions that you have described without being self-aware. That is the whole point. In order to do these things, you either must be a pre-programmed automaton with hard coded self-awareness, like a computer, or be innately self-aware.-In my earlier response I accepted your version of self-awareness "to a certain extent" and "in some limited form" (your terms), but emphasized the contrast with human self-awareness, which asks philosophical questions that I do not believe cells or our fellow animals to be capable of. I've said all along that I have a major problem of definition because I'm using an existing term ("intelligence") in a particular way ... but there is no other word to describe my concept. If I ascribe human-type self-awareness to first-cause intelligence, I might as well call it God. The whole point of my hypothesis is that first-cause "intelligence" has evolved in the same way as cells have evolved ... from relatively simple to extremely complex, the latter comprising our human level of self-awareness.
 
TONY: As many designers do now, I think that God most likely developed an emergent design, where a relatively small number of rules and constants allow for a near infinite variety, and then built layers of information into that. But that is purely speculation.-Of course. My hypothesis is pure speculation too.-DHW You don't have to convince me that there is a mystery here. That is at the heart of all our discussions! .. Theists think they have solved it by attributing life and innovations to an infinite, unknowable, self-aware, supreme intelligence which has always been there..-TONY: There is a fairly significant primary difference is that the concept of God or a UI supposes that it may have had a relative eternity in solitude in order to figure it out. No one knows what was going nor how long the time frame was before any sort of creative events began taking place.-Indeed. Exactly the same applies to the concept of an impersonal, low-level first-cause "intelligent" energy which has had an eternity to produce different combinations of matter.