I have elliot's book now and have used it to write this paper and may copy pages that I need for my paper. I want to write about the meaning of intelligence, thinking, and consciousness and how to best test for them. I guess I want to use a functionalist approach of defining intelligence as a measure of classifying a being's ability to perform a specified function. This lets us use terms like emotional, social, intellectual, and even physical intelligence. It also lets us test for levels of intelligence like with an IQ test. With this reasoning, it follows that tools can be rated by their instrumental or computational intelligence. We should understand thought as a tool used in conjunction with action by people to express their functional intelligence. I'm not really sure what I have to say about consciousness. Something about awareness. Maybe it should be classified by a being's intelligence factors. Like a being with certain levels of intelligence is conscious. Really consciousness is just awareness and so if a being has any awareness of its self and its action, then it has some level of consciousness. I guess that means that for every category of intelligence, we can make a category of consciousness. An object that is conscious, is consciously intelligent. If it is only somewhat conscious, then we can classify its consciousness accordingly. We can test for different aspects of intelligence and consciousness through a variety of ways. I'd say the turing test is a good way to test for conversational intelligence, but not great for conscious intelligence. I wanna talk about psychometrics and this "anytime universal intelligence" test. So..that's the paper idea. I kinda just made it up and there may be some other term that I should know that already fulfills the role of the word intelligence in my brief explanation. If so, then I may need serious redirection. But if not, and this sounds semi-coherent, I'd appreciate suggestions if you wouldn't mind.
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There's some interesting stuff going on in here, SD.
ReplyDeleteI like your point about the Turing test - it doesn't tell us anything about consciousness, just whether the thing has the ability to perform the function of carrying on a conversation. A neuroscientist that I know informs me that Turing was aware of that, but I think it's worth keeping in mind in the midst of hype about our being on the verge of creating sentient robots.
I also appreciate the distinction that you've drawn between different kinds of intelligence. I don't have much of a scientific or philosophical take on this distinction, but as a teacher I've found it to be quite useful and, well, functional. And it's worth noting that we may want to find other measures.
It may also be worth keeping in mind, though, that not all "specified functions" can be easily measured or quantified. How do we measure social intelligence, for instance? Or emotional intelligence, for that matter? Or something like interpretive intelligence? It's not clear to me that these can't be measured, but it's not clear to me that they can be either - or at least not in the same way that IQ can be measured.
It might also be worth adding a clarificatory note about consciousness: it strikes me that awareness of self and action are actually not necessary for consciousness. Simply being aware of anything, even if you had no unified sense of self, would seem to be sufficient.
The most substantive question I would have for you here would be about this quote:
"We should understand thought as a tool used in conjunction with action by people to express their functional intelligence."
Does this imply that thought is always utilitarian? Can this account take into consideration someone thinking alone by themselves in a way that doesn't really express anything to anyone except themselves? What if there is no action that goes alongside it?
This all strikes me as very interesting. Honestly, philosophy of mind baffles me, and I don't really know what to make of it. Random question: is the mind reducible to the brain? Whaddya think?
love the commentt!
ReplyDeleteto address the first paragraph with question marks: yea i'm not really sure we can place a sorta intelligence quotient value to every aspect of functional intelligence. and i guess the ability to express any aspect of your intelligence depends on experience. I mean a person could be born with the capacity to be socially or intellectually brilliant. I'd say they have that intelligence, but then if they are never have the experiences that help them build that intelligence, i don't know how we would classify it. They still have could have the capacity, but it's hard to test a person's potential plus they sure wouldn't seem intelligent. ehh. this paper's gonna be messy.
to the more substantive question: personally, i think all being is utilitarian. all for the greatest good. otherwise it wouldn't make sense to say we have a god. god is goodness. and being or existence is god's expression. how could it not be good. also, i made a distinction between thought and action above, but in reality, i feel like thought is an action because we are the actors thinking. it is just a mental action where the action i specified above was physical action. thoughts can cause a change in a person's mental disposition or their physical action. Either way, thought is always performing a function impacting an individual's action.
and to the random fellaa: i don't really have a definite answer about the idea of "the mind" in general. I believe that the state of my current mentality is dependent on the current disposition of my brain. I feel like the individual personal mind can only exist in conjunction with the life of the brain. I don't know what to think about post-death mentality, but i can't imagine that if i still had an individual self, I would have the same mental dispositions. i can accept the idea of merging with some sort of universal mentality and becoming a truth in the history of being. but to sum up my answer on reducibility of mind to brain, yea..i am who i am because of the neural organization of my brain which has become the way it is through my experiences. the mind is just the plain of concepts representing experiential understanding. it is just the screen projecting the patterns of activation of my brain i guess.