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The amoeba has zero neurons, and yet it can hunt prey and can reproduce sexually. Our understanding of intelligence is so laughably primitive that it is "not e
by otabdeveloper4 5y ago
The amoeba has zero neurons, and yet it can hunt prey and can reproduce sexually.
Our understanding of intelligence is so laughably primitive that it is "not even wrong".
- Joeri 5y agoMakes me think of the classic video of a white blood cell chasing a bacterium. You can sense the frantic desperation of the bacterium as it tries to get away from something monstrous that will inevitably swallow it whole. https://youtu.be/JnlULOjUhSQ https://youtu.be/JnlULOjUhSQ
- maxbond 5y agoI love this video and I agree that we tend to make entirely arbitrary decisions about what is and is not intelligent, which is far more a reflection on our own preconceptions than the nature of intelligence, but I would note that bacteria have a completely different experience of their environment than we do of ours, and always have a bit of a frantic vibe to them. On their scale, they are moving through molasses while being buffeted by particles causing them to turn and spin; they are entirely incapable of moving in a straight line, and their motility is fundamentally random. So they always have a sort of vibrating, frenetic quality to them.
- mjburgess 5y agoI think we're well aware that systems without intelligence can act as-if they have it. It is on this basis humans have been superstitiously imparting souls to any-old-thing for thousands of years.
- otabdeveloper4 5y agoWhat makes you say that an amoeba doesn't have intelligence?
- mjburgess 5y agointelligence, if it is to mean anything, is a property of agents who act guided by explicit interior representations of their external environment
- otabdeveloper4 5y agoAre you implying ameobas don't have some sort of interior representation of their external environment? I would be very hard to do what they do without one.
- mjburgess 5y agoWell there's implicit and explicit. In a sense, a boiling pot of water has an implicit representation of the heat of the gas flame -- in that the state of the water tracks the state of the flame. The question is whether the system is able to perform any explicit inference with those representations. Ie., is the representation explicit available, as a representation, eg., that this representation can be employed to imagine the world being a different way (the heart of solving problems using intelligence). It's worthwhile distinguishing a certain pun on the word "intelligence". We don't call gangster's intelligent, and physicists dumb -- despite gangster's being much more adept at most "physical skills". The esteem for "intelligence" comes from its association with The Intellect (ie., cognition and imaginative simulation, the place of explicit representation). Not from adept procreation, at which the cornavirus is presumably then almost "the most intelligent lifeform". An amoeba doesnt represent the world to itself. It's an interesting biochemical system which interacts with its environment in a way which seems as-if intelligent. Digital computers likewise seem as-if intelligent. Ie., they seem as-if they explicitly represent the world to themselves -- but they dont. Many things seem to be doing what we do, many things which dont, can (ie., we can automate some problem solving so that it doesnt need intelligence). But this is only seeming. These systems are nothing like us at all, they are radically alien -- they're, in any sympathetic sense, dead. There is "nothing that they are doing" -- there's no "they" there.