> Fundamentally, intelligence can be thought of as an organism's ability to sense, process, and respond to information to its adaptive advantage, forming memories to anticipate and optimize advantage in future encounters. By this definition, an amoeba has a rudimentary intelligence. So does a grove of aspen trees

But then what's an organism?

I'm no expert in the subject, but check out the concept of 'autopoesis', originally put forth by Maturana and Varela. Ms.Flack's approach seems to share many of the same assumptions.

An entity which has intelligence.

Something that is alive.

What qualifies as "something" and "alive"? Is a tree something, or is a whole grove of trees something?

Why not both?

Then why not the whole Earth? Why not the whole universe? Where do you draw the line? A word has to draw distinctions to be meaningful.

Exactly.

Exactly what? "Alive" is a meaningless concept?

Gurdjieff gives a definition of "atom" as the smallest amount of something that evinces all of its properties.

This is an information-theoretic view, and it allows us to speak of an "atom" of water, an "atom" of ice, and so on.

The property "alive" while not meaningless cannot be limited to a set of matter/energy configurations. There is no "atom" of life.

This would be moot except that you are alive. You are [part of] the life of the Universe. You can't actually fix a boundary between you and it. The Universe may not always have been alive, but when you became alive it did too.

any free agent

What is "free"? What is "agent"?

"agent": a word identifying an actor, derived from a word denoting an action (wikipedia). "Free": means that the agent is not tethered to a single course of action given environmental circumstances. "Intelligence" computation involving probabilities as to what option to choose (my own condensation of various relevant definitions). Which means that groves of aspen trees can't be intelligent ... yeah I think the premise is overstretching the meaning of intelligence. For PR purposes is my feeling.

By this definition, I argue no human is a free agent.

They are agents, perhaps. but "not tethered to a single course of action given environmental circumstances." Examples: As an aggregate, humans flinch away from heat and pain. There are outliers but they are insignificant enough to not be relevant (people neurological disorders, etc). Furthermore, a human has no control over their birth circumstances and thus the culture they are raised in, as an aggregate this means that generally there is little "freedom" in your values and worldview. Again, there are outliers, but in aggregate this is true.

"Fundamentally, intelligence can be thought of" - Personally I get grumpy when words get redefined in this way. The widely understood sense of the word (albeit a bit fuzzy) does at least not include the adaptive behavior of plants, and it's not like plants were just recently discovered to have such.

Like most attempts to define intelligence, this one falls short. I hope we can agree that brute force doesn't count, since it's nearly a orthogonal trait. But physical strength contributes to an organism's "ability" to "respond to information".

What we call computers are merely artifacts that algorithms run on. A misconception that the name Computer Science pushes. But the artifact can be anything that follows the rules of an algorithm.