Greetings All, I am an evolutionary biologist with particular interest in communication and behavior, so I approach the notion of intelligence from a different perspective than I have seen so far in this discussion. A recurrent theme in many of the FIS posts has been "what, if anything, is information?" (is it real or merely an heuristic concept), and I think this kind of ambiguity is much more expansive when considering "what, if anything, is intelligence?". I generally take intelligence to be about information processing by a system (e.g., the neurological system of a vertebrate). Of course, information processing (inputs leading to dynamical cascades within the system) can be utterly disconnected from the "smart" aspect of intelligence. In other words, information processing might not ultimately affect "knowledge" or global system behavior (e.g., animal behavior), or it might even lead to a "dumb" (the opposite of "smart", rather than a low level of smartness) response to the input information. This suggests to me that there is an inherently subjective aspect to assessing the quality of response to informational input in the measure of intelligence. I do not mean to raise the IQ debate; rather, I am arguing that intelligence per se does not really exist, even as a quality, unless we are willing to attach a clear and objective criterion for measurement. [Note that it has been my position that information does exist independent of our ability to detect or measure it.] One possibility, for example, could be the influence of information processing on evolutionary fitness. I don't actually recommend this criterion, because fitness is notoriously difficult to define and measure itself. However, if we can't agree on an objective criterion for measuring intelligence first, I am skeptical that we can have a cogent discussion about it or the relationship between information and intelligence.
Regards, Guy Hoelzer _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
