Naked Science Forum
General Science => General Science => Topic started by: Ian Scott on 24/07/2008 03:21:47
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Do we have intelligence - more correctly how can it be measured. An IQ score may be a poor measure - many idiot savants have high IQ but fail in life.
Can we know what intelligence is?
Mod edit - formatted the subject as a question. Please try to do this to help keep the forum tidy and easy to navigate - thanks!
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A computer can be given artificial intelligence, so long as it knows what numbers and equations are and it has been given a formula to work to it can carry out mathematical problems. Tell it all about the periodic table etc and it will be able to work out chemical reactions and so on and so forth.
I believe you have answered your own question, intelligence is being able to formulate a question or an opinion. Who is the most intelligent, the one who finds the answer to a problem using stored knowledge & formula (almost parrot fashion) or the one who has the intelligence to formulate the question in the first place from pure thought?
Perhaps intelligence should be evaluated by the number of questions we ASK rather than the number we answer.
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Well,
I think that intelligence is the ability to comprehend knowledge and go beyond into uncharted waters of thought
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Alan Turing basically said that intelligence couldn't be defined objectively. His Turing Test for artificial intelligence (AI)is a subjective exercise. Essentially, a human communicates with a machine and another human without knowing which is which. If the human can't distinguish between the machine and the other human, that's a point for AI. I don't know what it means if the human picks the machine as the other human. Presumably, the determination of Turing Test intelligence would be based on a statistical analysis of many trials.
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The Turing Test was proposed long before computers were as good as they are today.
Nowadays it is quite possible to have a phone conversation with a computer whilst booking tickets, for instance, and not to be aware that it isn't a human you're talking to. Of course, many times it goes wrong and the thing just sounds like a real dork (or a really difficult human, perhaps).
You can look to one end or the other of a human life and try to determine where 'intelligence' starts and finishes. A newly born infant's reactions are much more limited than those of a dog, say. By how much do they need to improve before you would acknowledge the presence of intelligence?
Basically "you can recognise it when you see it but you can't describe it objectively". Is there something fundamental about the limitations of a system analysing itself?