As a biologist and longtime dabbler machine learning and Bayesian methods, I tend to see intelligence as a manifestation of evolution. In the case of an organis

As a biologist and longtime dabbler machine learning and Bayesian methods, I tend to see intelligence as a manifestation of evolution. In the case of an organism, the improvement of the model (the genome) occurs through processes that are very similar to what we see in any kind of learning (real, brain based or "artificial", computer based). Evolution and intelligence are inextricably linked. They are practically the same thing. This means that intelligence is probably a natural result of any system similar to those that support biologics. If you flow the right amount of energy through a substrate with complex enough building blocks, you'll eventually get life ~ which is just something smart enough to survive and feed off the available energy flows. In the world, this flow is radiation from the sun, while in a computer, it is governed by a more abstract loss or fitness function.