Intelligence, What is it?

Biology. The study of life. What does it mean to be alive? That question has been pondered by many an adventure seeker, adrenaline junkie and biologist. We, as a scientific community, have actually come up with a good answer to that question, but I am not going to get into that today. Let us leave it to say if something can obtain energy, grow, and reproduce on its own it is generally considered alive. I want to ask you a harder question however, what is intelligence? What does it mean to be intelligent? Can a computer program be intelligent? These questions are those that merge biology, computer science, and philosophy all into one.

We still do not have a concrete understanding of intelligence. Intelligence, like the concept of life, is not something physical we can interact with. It is a description of what happens internally. When we think about how to solve a problem, like moving your arm from one place to another, or how to solve a math problem, we use, what we call, intelligence. Or, is it called consciousness? What is the difference between intelligence and consciousness? Since we have such a poor understanding of both concepts and they many times refer to the same internal state, whenever I say intelligence, I also mean consciousness.

So, why is it that we still do not have a solid grasp of intelligence if we call ourselves intelligent beings? Do dogs have intelligence, or birds, or monkeys? Is intelligence limited only to mammals, or can a beetle have intelligence, or a fish, or a bacteria? What about this, does a plant have intelligence? What distinguishes intelligent beings from non-intelligent beings? To be intelligent do you have to solve a math problem, or is intelligence integral to being alive such that all living things have forms of intelligence? These questions are hard to answer because we do not, in fact, know how to properly rate our human intelligence.

What about the IQ test I hear you saying? “The IQ test can rate intelligence!” The Intelligence quotient test (IQ test) was not developed to rate or define intelligence. Instead Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon developed what would become the IQ test to distinguish mentally challenged children from lazy children. It tests how well a person can use information and logic to answer questions or make predictions. How well a person can answer or make predictions using logic, may seem like an adequate way to measure intelligent, but computers have been used to make good predictions using logical calculations for centuries. If this is the definition of intelligence, than computers, and even calculators, should be labeled as being intelligent. I do not think that is appropriate since it does not take into consideration the ability to think, feel, or respond to external stimuli.

I do not have an appropriate definition of intelligence for you, unfortunately. The reason for this essay is not to solve the problem I laid out in the first paragraph. Instead, my purpose is to get you to think about these questions, and hopefully discuss them among your peers, because they are important questions we may need to solve in order to identify whether an artificial intelligence (AI) possess true intelligence. Without an appropriate answer to these questions we cannot identify if an AI is intelligent, or has consciousness, which may have ethical implications.

This is one reason why research into the neuroscience of intelligence is so important. Not just studying our human intelligence, although that is a fantastic place to start, but also studying intelligence in animals. Defining a theory for intelligence, and consciousness, may help us not only identify whether an AI is conscious but whether a comatose or patient in a vegetative state may be conscious. If we can define the criteria for identifying a conscious or intelligent AI, we may also be able to save the lives of comatose patients who otherwise may loose their lives. It is all connected, the research of biology will impact AI, and research of AI is already helping research into biology.

This is not the last you will hear about how these two fields overlap, as surprisingly they do so not just in healthcare but basic research and in the development of smarter AI. Stay tuned, or rather subscribe to be notified immediately about future articles, and please share this article if you enjoyed it. Oh and thank you for reading this article, I sincerely appreciate it!