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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
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Date: 28 Nov 88 06:51:16 GMT
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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.