Xref: utzoo comp.ai:2715 talk.philosophy.misc:1634 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!ames!sgi!arisia!quintus!ok From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Summary: Mortimer J. Adler's definition Message-ID: <757@quintus.UUCP> Date: 28 Nov 88 06:51:16 GMT References: <484@soleil.UUCP> <1654@hp-sdd.HP.COM> <1908@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <1791@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> <819@novavax.UUCP> <1811@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> Sender: news@quintus.UUCP Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc. Lines: 36 In Chapter 2 of "Ten Philosophical Mistakes", Mortimer J. Adler says We ordinarily speak of any living organism that has some consciousness of its environment and of itself as having a mind. We also attribute intelligence to that organism if, in addition to such consciousness, it reacts in some discriminating fashion to the environment of which it is aware. It should be added, perhaps, that we generally regard mind and intelligence as the means by which sentient organisms learn from experience and modify their behaviour accordingly. By these criteria, the only animals to which we would not attribute mind or intellignece are those the behaviour of which is completely determined by innate, preformed patterns of behaviour that we call instincts. ... For [humans] as well as for [animals], mind or intelligence stands for faculties or powers employed in learning from experience and in modifying behaviour in consequence of such learning. This definition of intelligence would appear to be one that could meaningfully be applied to machines. A machine which learned in fewer trials, or was capable of learning more complex ideas, could be said to possess super-human intelligence. It is interesting that Adler's definition implicitly takes into account the varying sensory capacities of organisms: unlike a fish we cannot learn to adapt our behaviour to the presence or absence of a weak electric field, but that is not a defect of intelligence, because we are incapable of experiencing the presence or absence of the field. It would be a defect of intelligence to be unable to learn from something that we _are_ capable of experiencing. In fact, psychologists sometimes test whether an organism can learn to dsicriminate between two conditions as a method of determining whether the organism can perceive the difference.