Where would you draw the border between "merely alive" and "intelligent"?

All multicellular living things seem to do some information processing. We would not agree to call a fungus intelligent, but would agree to call a human intelligent.

OK, from human we can descend to an ape, a dog, a crow, a sparrow, a crocodile, a goldfish, a flatworm, a jellyfish. Jellyfish don't have a dedicated nervous system and probably can't be called "intelligent". But can you determine where in the sequence there is a cliff, an abrupt enough change that delimits "intelligence"? I have trouble doing that in a meaningful, non-arbitrary way.

I think intelligence starts when the internal system controlling behavior develops a model of the outside environment and operates on it to drive decisions. That is, behavior is not through a simple physical mechanism or evolutionarily refined control system, but by means of general purpose model making.

Intelligence has degrees that begins with any abstraction and ends with arbitrary conscious theorizing and decision making (and a metric of how effective this ability is).

> I think intelligence starts when the internal system controlling behavior develops a model of the outside environment and operates on it to drive decisions.

But isn't that what one of the studied fungi did? To make a decision to grow into the direction where it found food the last time instead of every direction like it did before, it needs to have some sort of model of its environment in its memory, and needs to be able to make decisions based on that model.

> To make a decision to grow into the direction where it found food the last time instead of every direction like it did before

chemoreception

> They are so smart that they find the shortest paths between nodes arranged as Japanese cities

survivor bias

> All multicellular living things seem to do some information processing.

Even unicellular ones has to do it, that is what a complex adaptive system that wants to sustain its life-state has to do. But none of this is symbolic processing the way humans are capable of. Reducing intelligence to mere adaptivity simply makes it a useless term.

Good! How can we find out if an organism is capable of symbolic processing?

Feed it some letters and see what happens...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaD7AwPC5Pw&ab_channel=Sesam...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtb2EKGBNr8&ab_channel=Sesam...

The [1] the Panpsychists might drop sagree on some points there.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

Intelligence is a human-biased term. We basically use it, informally at least, to separate ourselves from the rest of nature "oh, they're not sentient, they're not intelligent".

Not everything in the world. Rocks are not intelligent. That's simple enough. They don't encode any information as far as I can see, they certainly don't actively process or transform it.

Living systems seem to. Even bacteria. Information theory seems too applicable when I look at DNA. All living systems seem intelligent, to varying degrees, as they are storing, duplicating and conditionally applying patterns to various biochemical problems in the task of propagating the rulebook of solutions further, the same task that the intelligence of the brain was evolved for. I worry this is more pseudospiritual woo rather than philosophy, though.

Never underestimate the behavioral complexity of rocks!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones

>Sailing stones (also called sliding rocks, walking rocks, rolling stones, and moving rocks) are part of the geological phenomenon in which rocks move and inscribe long tracks along a smooth valley floor without animal intervention. The movement of the rocks occurs when large sheets of ice a few millimeters thick and floating in an ephemeral winter pond break up on sunny days. Frozen during cold winter nights, these thin, floating ice panels are driven by wind and shove rocks at speeds up to 5 meters per minute.

The three types of pet rocks are: ingenius, sentimentalary, and anthropomorphic.

I invented and implemented a pie menu remote control touch screen interface on the PocketPC for sending commands to pet rocks (and it also works with many feral rocks):

Pet Rock Remote Control:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0FAKkaisg&ab_channel=DonHo...

The essential key to successfully training happy and obedient pet rocks is to repeatedly and consistently give them commands they can perform well, like "Sit", "Stay", "Play Dead", "Roll Over", "Gather Moss", and lots of positive reinforcement immediately after they obey what you tell them to do: "Good Rock!"

I need to look this up, but there was an geology/astrobiology faculty at Caltech looking at the computation abilities of certain crystal formations.

And that drills down into my point.

"alive" and "intelligent" shouldn't by synonyms. We should reserve the word "intelligent" for a certain considerably higher level of ability and complexity than can be ascribed to most anything living. When you say every living system is intelligent, the word ceases to add any information and you might as well just say "alive" and drop "intelligent".

For practical purposes, I get you. But if it is the same essence at its very core, maybe we shouldn't separate them so vigorously when we think about it philosophically.

And this is where much of philosophy ends up, coming to an agreement (or not) as to the boundaries and conditions where a term should be applied.

How intelligent is your smartphone? It's made of rocks.

The borders between alive and dead, intelligent and not intelligent are arbitrary and very much up for debate.

Sure, but if you broaden the word "intelligent" to include the behavior of mycelium you probably need a different word for the quality only shared by vertebrates and cephalopods with more complex brains and internal representations of the world. Then somebody is going to use that word for fungus too and on and on. The key disagreement is the comparison in quality being measured between humans and to a lesser degree many animals and the degree of that quality had by fungi. The article is using a word in such a way that less familiar people make false associations between fungi and animals with brains. Like using the same word for a hammer and an industrial assembly robot. Ok sure, both "tools", but an article in a popular science magazine is trying to bring things close together which really are not, mostly because that kind of idea appeals to a kind of person who doesn't have very much knowledge. It's not harmful to debate the word intelligence, it probably is to go around using the word with a common understanding and broaden its meaning to make an appealing but misleading point.

So you are saying that portraying the levels of alive vs. intelligent as too similar can be detrimental and is used as a cheap tactic to appeal to a certain kind of lax thinking. I agree. I also think people can be too quick to write off systems or things they consider unintelligent. When we think it is just a “dumb” fungi or whatever else, it takes us longer to recognize true complexity and intelligence in a different form than we are used to. So I personally lean more into defending looser definitions of intelligence and aliveness because I think there’s a lot more to some of these systems we may not have the perspective for yet. I see the argument for a tighter definition too.