X-Message-Number: 4332
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: CRYONICS Intelligence
Date: Wed, 3 May 1995 02:05:48 +1000 (EST)

Robert Ettinger and John Clark have been testing Turing for a while now,
and it seems that they're almost ready to agree to disagree. I have a couple
of brief comments to make before they are quite finished.

It seems to me that we might simplify our question. Before we ask, "is
this process intelligent?" we ought to ask, "is this process alive".
For my money at least, life is a prerequisite for intelligence.

Now no one would suggest a Turing test for life; no one would suggest
that there is an absolute criterion we can employ to distinguish
mechanism from organism. Though living processes are composed of simple
physical interactions, mundane material undergoing well-understood
physical transformations, these transformations occur equally well
in situations that we would not describe as living. Life inheres
to the relationships between these mundane processes.

A Turing-style committee might be presented with a wilted flower and a
new bud, and they might pronounce the one dead and the other alive. Yet
we know that ecosystems involve decay and rebirth, and that the absence
of either one swiftly results in stagnation. The committee's opinion is
not relevant to the viability of the ecosystems from which the two flowers
were drawn. 

A process that is observed to recur and evolve within one ecosystem may
be non-viable, self-destructive or even worse within another. It seems
then that it is this viability that is necessary in order to ascribe
life to the flowers.  

This at least lends some predictive power to the determination.  I
think it should be plain that intelligence may also be ascribed only
within a specific context. Why? As with the flowers, if we present our
committee with two boxes, one chatting gaily and pertinently about its
interests, and the other smashed and silent, we should not accept their
judgements as to which one is intelligent, for their opinion is not
relevant to the ongoing intelligence of the minds that are providing
these boxes ... 

--

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http://www.usyd.edu.au/~pete/          |         Reject Nothing.               |


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