Thread: The secrets of intelligence lie within a single cell

Originally Posted by SnakeCharmer

If you want to define intelligence in this way, then thermostats are also intelligent.

Yes, they are. Something is said to be intelligent when it displays good judgment. Even the behavior of human beings is broken down this way when examined by science. You can't ask someone if they are intelligent, you just observe their behavior as well as the circumstances that it is exhibited under. Every time the temperature in a room drops below a certain point, the thermostat displays an appropriate response; it clicks on the heater to warm the room up. If the room temp goes above a certain point, the thermostat clicks the heater off so it doesn't get too warm. How is this different from a monkey pressing a button to get a treat, or an infant pulling its hand away from a hot burner; except that the thermostat, like the cell, is built or 'born' to function in this way and the monkey or the infant must first learn the behavior?

Originally Posted by Black_Eagle

I wonder if the internet is sentient...

Sentience is different from intelligence. I'm not saying that the internet is both or neither sentient or intelligent, though; I think that is a topic for another thread.

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

Yes, they are. Something is said to be intelligent when it displays good judgment.

The point here is that, as far as thermostat or cells are concerned, there is no other choice available. They make decisions like that because they are hard-wired to do so. There is no creativity involved, no solution to problems that are outside of what the original response was meant to solve.

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

How is this different from a monkey pressing a button to get a treat, or an infant pulling its hand away from a hot burner; except that the thermostat, like the cell, is built or 'born' to function in this way and the monkey or the infant must first learn the behavior?

I'm not saying it's different. I'm saying it's not intelligent in a way humans are intelligent. Since you already defined intelligence to include such behavior, any further discussion would just be about what "intelligence" really means.

In a sense, you are right. When people talk about artifical intelligence, they often talk about algorithms inspired by biological systems: neural networks, swarms, ant colony optimization and so on. But human intelligence is much more than just optimization of response to external stimuli. That's what I mean when I say that you really have to stretch the definition of intelligence if you want to cover both molecular, cellular and human behavior.

Human intelligence is most certainly just optimization of response to external stimuli. The only reason why this might appear to not be so is because the shear amount of stimuli that we are capable of receiving and processing is beyond our current understanding. We can clearly understand what stimuli affects a cell, and so it looks like it acts in a programmed way. We don't know all of the stimuli that affects the judgment of a human being and so we erroneously believe that there is some special element to our decision making.

I am not saying that a cell is as intelligent as a human, or even that it has the same kind of intelligence; and I don't think the articles/research is trying to make that claim either. I am merely saying that one cannot call a human being intelligent while saying that a cell is just a machine carrying out its programming. A cell is no more or less programmed than a human. If one is intelligent to some degree, then so is the other. If a cell is not intelligent because it must operate within the confines of its capabilities then a human being is not really intelligent either.

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

Human intelligence is most certainly just optimization of response to external stimuli.

That's true for >99% of all human activity. But would you reduce doing, for example, abstract math to the same thing?