Basal cognition: what is intelligence (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, June 17, 2024, 15:56 (157 days ago) @ David Turell

Difficult to define:

https://aeon.co/essays/why-intelligence-exists-only-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder?utm_sour...

"Instead of a measurable, quantifiable thing that exists independently out in the world, we suggest that intelligence is a label, pinned by humanity onto a bag stuffed with a jumble of independent traits that helped our ancestors thrive. Though people treat intelligence as a coherent whole, it remains ill-defined because it’s really a shifting array masquerading as one thing.

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"Intelligence is not central to the success of most life on Earth. Consider the grasses: they’ve flourished across incredibly diverse global environments, without planning or debating a single step. Planarian worms regrow any part of their body and are functionally immortal, a trick we can manage only in science fiction. And a microscopic virus effectively shut down global human movement in 2020, without having any notion of what humans even are.

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"...intelligence is not and never has been a single entity. Instead, it is a hominin-shaped heuristic, a way for us to easily perceive valued characteristics in other people. Like beauty, it lies in the eye of the beholder...nothing in intelligence makes sense except in the light of humanity, and our own evolved perceptions.

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"Intelligence does not refer to a single measurable trait or quality, but rather it indexes behaviours and capacities that have arisen at different times throughout our species’ evolutionary history...No surprise, then, that the traits recognisable to us as intelligence co-occur almost exclusively in modern humans.

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"Our minds also have a set of alerts that can drag you out of cruise control. Predators trigger those alerts, as does a sudden loud noise, an unexpected fall, a delicious smell from a nearby bakery or hotdog stand, or a particularly attractive person walking by. What these events have in common is not their intrinsic nature, but what they elicit in us: surprise.

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When an animal surprises us by achieving a goal, solving a problem, or enacting a successful strategy that we did not expect, we are primed to register the mismatch between the demonstrated behaviour and our expectations as intelligence. (my bold)

"This happens more than we might think, for example, when we mistakenly think that something is too simple or small to perform a complex sequence of actions. In this way, bees or bacteria can appear more intelligent the more we get to know them. However, we have inbuilt limits to how long we can remain surprised. Continued enquiry may ultimately set a new baseline of expectations, to the extent that we lose our surprise and dial back how much of their behaviour we label as intelligence, until eventually we come to see it as explicable evolutionary programming. We recalibrate our expectations, just in time to stop short of ascribing ‘true’ intelligence to nonhuman entities. (my bold)

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"Moreover, when we describe other animals or things as having intelligence, we may inadvertently impute them with other human-like qualities. (my bold)

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"Like life and time, intelligence is a helpful shorthand for a complex idea that helps us structure our lives, as people. It is primarily a synonym for humanness, and judging other animals by this metric does a disservice to their own unique sea otterness, worminess, or sharkfulness.

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"A focus on behaviours that resemble ours often plasters over much more interesting questions. What might success look like to a tardigrade, or a pigeon, or a horseshoe crab? Would a peacock mantis shrimp, able to see an almost unfathomable array of colours (as well as polarised light) and strike with incredible force while generating ultrasonic cavitation bubbles, be moved by our ability to beat them at checkers?

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"Eventually, instead of talking about how machines, animal collectives, or individual birds and bugs exhibit intelligence, we should be better prepared to investigate how they evolved or iterated those actions in their own evolutionary spaces, unshackled from human-shaped standards... A planet full of problem-solving life exists apart from humans, and none of it is obligated to fit neatly into our subjective, self-serving mindset. We need to avoid the real risk that we will miss animal or machine (or plant, fungal, bacterial, or even extraterrestrial) ways of succeeding just because they are fundamentally alien to our conceptual toolkit.

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"What may change is our capacity to appreciate other kinds of life on their own terms, divorced from anthropocentric box-checking. What we hope our suggestion does is prevent any one limited metric from skewing or obscuring the diverse kinds of success that exist in our world, including those we have yet to discover. We won’t just see more clearly, we’ll see more than we did before. If intelligence is no longer a default metric for species’ worthiness, how might our value judgments shift? Would we be more inclined toward wonder, and might this wonder impel us to conserve the other wondrous creatures with whom we share this planet, and the environments in which they evolved their own flavours of success? We think that would be the smart thing to do.

Comment: What looks like intelligence evolved survival techniques. dhw take notice.