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 ... -- Internet: | Accept Everything. | http://www.usyd.edu.au/~pete/ | Reject Nothing. | Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=4332