Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!maytag!watdragon!violet.waterloo.edu!cpshelley
From: cpshelley@violet.waterloo.edu (cameron shelley)
Subject: intelligence is what?
Message-ID: <1990Oct11.195803.18308@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Sender: daemon@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Owner of Many System Processes)
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 90 19:58:03 GMT
Lines: 37

  Many postings suggest that "intelligence", "self-awareness",
"consciousness", and so forth are equivalent or at least strongly
related.  What is it that necessarily makes them so?  Does
intelligence automatically imply the ability to perform introspection,
by which act applied to itself constitutes self-awareness?

	ie. self-awareness = intelligence(introspection)?

In other words, intelligence is a relation which can (among other
things) map introspection to self-awareness (a holistic sense).  This
may characterize subjectivity, but isn't objectivity also an important
part of "intelligence"?  Maybe:

	    consciousness = intelligence(extraspection)?

Sorry about "extraspection", but I think you get the idea. :>  To 
interpret: consciousness is a sense of place in "the world" arrived
at by applying intelligence to observation?  Note that the above
"equations" allow for degrees of self-awareness and consciousness
dependant on degree of intelligence and raw observational faculty.

  This also would remove intelligence from being a "thing" describable
by say, a feature vector, to a set of translations from feature vectors
to states like self-awareness etc.  No necessary restriction on the
determinism of the translations is implied.  Also, this is not dualist
since the mechanism of the *spections is not eliminated.

  I do not propose to push this "algebra" too far, I just brought it
up to suggest that the notion of intelligence as used so far may not
be as complete as it should be.


--
      Cameron Shelley        | "Saw, n.  A trite popular saying, or proverb. 
cpshelley@violet.waterloo.edu|  So called because it makes its way into a
    Davis Centre Rm 2136     |  wooden head."
 Phone (519) 885-1211 x3390  |				Ambrose Bierce