(July 12, 2023 – August 24, 2023)
(The following text was created with the support of the software deepL from a German text)
–!! To be continued !!–
–!! See new comment at the end of the text (Aug 24, 2023)!!–
CONTEXT
We live in a time in which – if one takes different perspectives – very many different partial world views can be perceived, world views which are not easily ‘compatible’ with each other. Thus, so far, the ‘physical’ and the ‘biological’ worldviews do not necessarily seem to be ‘aligned’ with each other. In addition, there are different directions within each of these worldviews. Where do the social sciences stand here: Not physics, not biology, but then what? The economic sciences also seem to be ‘surfing across’ everything else … this list could easily be extended. Within these assemblies of worldviews, a new worldview emerges quite freshly, that of so-called ‘artificial intelligence’; it is also almost completely unmediated with everything else, but makes heavy use of terminology borrowed from psychology and biology, without adopting the usual conceptual contexts of these terms.
This diversity can be seen as positive if it stimulates thinking and thus perhaps enables new exciting ‘syntheses’. However, there is nothing to be seen of ‘syntheses’ far and wide. The terms ‘interdisciplinary’, ‘multidisciplinary’ or even ‘transdisciplinary’ are probably used more and more often in texts, as a reminder, as a call to integrate diversity in a fruitful way, but there is not much to be seen of it yet. The average university teacher at an average university still tends to be ‘punished’ for venturing out of his disciplinary niche. The ‘curricular norms’ that determine what time may be spent on what content with how many students do not normally provide for multidisciplinary or even transdisciplinary teaching. And when the single-science trained researcher throws himself into a multidisciplinary research project (if he does it at all), then in the end usually only single-science comes out again ….
Against this panorama of many worldviews, the following text will attempt to interpret how the concept of ‘intelligence’ could be grasped and classified today – taking into account the whole range of worldviews. Thereby a special accent will be put on the phenomenon ‘Homo sapiens’: Although Homo sapiens is only a very small sub-population within the whole of the biological, in the course of evolution it takes nevertheless up to now a special position in multiple senses, which shall be considered in this attempt of interpretation.
‘INTELLIGENCE’ – An interpretive hypothesis
This text intends a conceptual clarification of the concept ‘intelligence’ in the larger context of ‘biological systems’. ‘Machine systems’ with specific ‘behavioral properties’ that show ‘similarities’ to such properties that are ‘usually’ called ‘intelligent’ in the case of biological systems are then called ‘machine forms of intelligence’ in this text. However, ‘similarities’ in ‘behavior’ cannot be used to infer ‘similarities in enabling structures’. A ‘behavior X’ can be produced by a variety of ‘enabling structures’ which may be different among themselves. Statements about the ‘intelligence of a system’ therefore refer specifically to ‘behavioral properties’ of that system that can be observed within a particular ‘action environment’ within a particular ‘time interval’. Explicit talk about ‘intelligence’ further presupposes that there is a ‘virtual concept intelligence’ represented in the form of a text, which is able to classify the many individual ’empirical observations’ into ‘virtual contexts/relationships’ in such a way, that both (i) when certain behaviors ‘occur’ with the ‘virtual concept intelligence’ one can assign (classify) the occurring phenomena to the area of ‘intelligent behavior’, and that (ii) with the ‘virtual concept intelligence’ starting from a ‘given situation’ one can make conditional ‘predictions’ about ‘possible behaviors’ that can be ‘expected’ and ’empirically verified’ by the target system.
New Comment
While I was preparing a public lecture for a conference at the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany) ( https://zevedi.de/en/topics/ki-text-2/ ) I decided to abandon the concept of ‘intelligence’ as well as ‘artificial intelligence’ for the near future. The meaning of these concepts is meanwhile completely ‘blurred’ / ‘fuzzy’; to use these concepts or not doesn’t change anything.