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From: DRogers@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Intelligence and Competition
Message-ID: <13171@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 30-Oct-83 18:41:18 EST
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.13171
Posted: Sun Oct 30 18:41:18 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 4-Nov-83 01:32:31 EST
Lines: 37

From:  David Rogers <DRogers@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>

           From: RICKL%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
        I don't think I believe in "pure, abstract intelligence, divorced
    from the world".  However, a consequence of the second position seems to
    be that there should be possible worlds in which we would consider humans
    to be un-intelligent, and I can't readily think of any (can anyone else?).

           From: Jay <JAY@USC-ECLC>
           ...Take  desert tortoises,  [...]

Combining these two comments, I came up with this:

            ...Take American indians, although they are quite young compared
      to amoeba, they have been living in the desert some thousands of years.
      Does this mean they are intelligent? NO! Put a freeway (or some barbed
      wire) through their desert and they are soon dying. Increase cultural
      competition and they may be unable to compete with the white man (which
      will take full advantage of their lack of guns and produce an
      increase in white-ation). The ability to cope with CHANGE in the
      environment marks intelligence.

I think that the stress on "adaptability" makes for some rather strange
candidates for intelligence. The indians were developing a cooperative
relationship with their environment, rather than a competitive one; I cannot
help but think that our cultural stress on competition has biased us
towards competitive definitions of intelligence.

    Survivability has many facets, and competition is only one of them, and
may not even be a very large one. Perhaps before one judges intelligence on
how systems cope with change, how about intelligence with how the systems
cope with stasis? While it is popular to think about how the great thinkers
of the past arose out of great trials, I think that more of modern knowledge
came from times of relative calm, when there was enough surplus to offer
a group of thinkers time to ponder.

David