Basal cognition: what is intelligence? (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, June 20, 2024, 11:59 (154 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE:"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.”
And later: “It is primarily a synonym for humanness.”

Dhw: I’m aghast at the sheer arrogance of these statements. […]

DAVID: You are so aghast, because there are others unlike you who do not share your love of intelligence in lower forms. I am one of them. Beware of anthropomorphizing others' mental capacities. What looks intelligent can be the result of intelligent design providing intelligent responses to needs or changing environment.

I went on to list the attributes that most of us would regard as signs of intelligence.

dhw: This is not anthropomorphizing. The above attributes would have been present long before we came on the scene, as far back as organisms such as bacteria. Even you, in your more enlightened moments, put the odds at 50/50, which means it is perfectly possible for organisms that behave intelligently actually to be intelligent. Please tell us what attributes you would regard as indicative of autonomous intelligence.

DAVID: The author warns of anthropomorphizing in analyzing possible intelligence. You have given the proper list and i agree to it with the proviso that it equally be all from intelligent design, in which I believe.

Your response is ambiguous. I’m quite happy to accept the possibility that all these attributes were designed by your God if he exists. But do you agree that such God-designed attributes enable organisms to take their own decisions and solve their problems AUTONOMOUSLY?

Ant intelligence:

dhw: The very fact that this process covers the whole of evolution (99.9% of which had no connection with your God’s one and only purpose) makes far more sense if – still in the context of theism – we assume that the intelligent design was done by the organisms themselves, and your God only provided the original ability to design. This would also explain why the 99.9% appeared and disappeared: their intelligence was not sufficient to overcome new requirements when conditions changed. Only 0.1% had enough (see Raup, who apparently calls them the lucky ones).

DAVID: Back you go to secondhand designing. God must give organisms a full course in intelligent design so He can just sit back and watch, stepping in stop and correct mistakes. Fully inefficient and more cumbersome than direct designing.

The only “course in intelligent design” is your alternative to your 3.8-billion-year-old programme for every design, which is courses or dabbles whenever there is a new problem. And the only “stepping in” is done by your version of a dabbling God, who either corrects his own mistakes or deliberately culls the 99.9% of species which he inefficiently designed although they were irrelevant to his purpose. The theory that organisms do their own designing does indeed leave your God setting up the system and then sitting back and watching, or possibly abandoning us altogether. That’s called deism. Totally efficient and not in the least cumbersome, if that was what he wanted to do. (He could also dabble if he felt like it.) And since his reasons are unknowable, please don’t pretend that you know what reasons he couldn’t have had. A free-for-all (like my experimentation alternatives) is just as feasible as your messy, inefficient blunderings, solves the problem of the irrelevant 99.9%, and even solves the problem of theodicy. As Doris Day once sang to us: “Que sera sera.”