it's worth noting that the most basic definition of intelligence is "a system's ability to leverage sensory input in determining its outputs"; much follows from this, as there are many different ways in which inputs might influence behavior, ie, decision-making.
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RT @architectonyx
on intelligent design
so i don't believe any alien intelligence has intervened with the development of life on earth; the only argument for this tends …
https://twitter.com/architectonyx/status/1440354001434779653
this means that many more systems have some amount of intelligence than the colloquial definition would imply; for ex, a simple amoeba has some amount of intelligence, as it senses the environment to find food. plants have some intelligence, as they can detect and follow the sun.
this analytic mode brings us to the abstraction of computation, as it provides a method to quantify the amount of complexity a system must have in order to achieve some level of intelligence; physical systems have computational complexity! this is an underappreciated fact
in fact, it is possible to quantify the internal complexity, and hence intelligence, of any physical system, provided we're able to monitor all of its information flux; this has Implications for the ability of adversarial AGI to conceal its nature
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RT @pee_zombie
the dimension along which these points lie is one of depth; how much is there "inside"? what complexity of causal mechanism is contained within the boundaries of the system…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1391632227247788032
more mundanely, this is comparable to problems in the social sphere too; consider the phenomenon of "playing dumb"; how do you know they're faking it? bc you observe some piece of information they leak which reveals their hidden complexity
this idea can be extended universally
compare a pile of sand and a large quartz crystal; in the latter, due to its highly ordered internal structure, its informational outputs are much more correlated w/ its inputs, while in the former the inputs are averaged out & mostly lost.
imagine a laser pointed at both
tbf, the concept gets trickier here, as a sense the pile of sand has greater internal complexity! this is where the concept of entropy comes in; the sand piles internal states, while many, are basically indistinguishable from each other, generating the same observed behavior.
information theory, computer science, and systems thinking provide highly effective analytic lenses for understanding the nature of intelligence & how it fits into broader universal dynamics; if we're willing to leave colloquialisms behind, much is rendered comprehensible.
while panpsychism is a degenerate form of this idea, it has some truth to it, namely that in a continuous universe, no object truly ever has a property value of zero, on basically any dimension. this means that a rock has some intelligence, namely in how it refracts vibrations.