What Exactly IS Intelligence? (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Friday, August 20, 2010, 13:32 (4997 days ago) @ xeno6696

If there is such a thing as a UI, I would expect its intelligence to be much the same as ours, but immeasurably more advanced. Matt, now wildly excited, asks: "What would make an intelligence immeasurably more advanced?"-I can only answer in terms of realities I think I know about. A UI must have the ability to fashion what we call the laws of Nature, in order to allow matter firstly to form conditions suitable for life, and then to assemble the chemical and biological elements necessary to create the mechanisms for life, reproduction, adaptation and innovation, leading eventually to the amazingly complex thinking, feeling, imagining, creating machine which is us. In order to accomplish these scientific feats, a UI will have a conscious ability to perceive, learn, understand and think about things, and to apply the knowledge thereby acquired. We humans have come a long way, but we are not able to get anywhere near this scale of scientific know-how ... hence "immeasurably more advanced". -Perhaps I should anticipate various follow-ups to this by saying (a) I haven't a clue whether such a UI exists; (b) I haven't a clue how it might have come into existence if it does exist; (c) I haven't a clue whether matter itself has always been there or was also part of the creation; (d) if it has always been there, I haven't a clue what it was like before the hypothetical UI fiddled around with it. However, I am convinced that I exist, and as science gradually unravels the mechanisms that make me what I am, I don't think it is unreasonable to suppose that science might have put those mechanisms together in the first place. The very fact that I am consciously able to perceive, learn, understand, think etc. and actually create new things through these faculties therefore does give me a possible clue to the nature of the intelligence that may have created the mechanisms.