I used to think this but I don't know anymore. Without our bodies to provide stimuli what input is the brain going to use for thinking or reasoning? So much of what we do day to day is hard-linked to our body/sensorium. The brain without the spinal cord/nervous system is useless.

{{Citation needed}}

{{fart noises}}

Not without lungs, you don't...

But actually there's a real interesting thing here. People used to believe that the heart did the thinking. Phinneas Gage upended that theory, and now people think that the brain is the thinker. More recently, we're learning that the gut has a massive neural network, and the brain-gut connection is being investigated today. Likewise, "muscle memory" isn't in the muscles nor the brain, it's distributed among neural clusters all throughout your body. How much of "you" (your knowledge, your personality, your physical skills) is actually contained within the head is entirely non-obvious.

This is sophomoric. First of all, muscle memory is not contained in your muscles or "distributed" throughout your body but is known to reside in your cerebellum and basal ganglia. The nerves going down to your muscles are simply a conduit for actuation, a wire, nothing more.

As far as your gut, if you claim that a thermostat is intelligent then sure your gut is also intelligent (don't forget the microbiome in there too).

> This is sophomoric.

Says the user who just made fart noises. Your confidence here is dunning.

I literally just followed suit. Don't like the response, don't lead. You're being hypocritical.

Peripheral nervous system has significant plasticity and its reflex archs can produce complex and purposeful behavior without the brain. E.g. cats can walk with their brain removed and famously decapitated chicken do all sorts of stuff.

Octopi don't even have a centralized brain.

I'm not disputing that. What does that have to do with whether a human brain is inherently intelligent?

I was replying to this:

> First of all, muscle memory is not contained in your muscles or "distributed" throughout your body but is known to reside in your cerebellum and basal ganglia. The nerves going down to your muscles are simply a conduit for actuation, a wire, nothing more.

Sure, replace a living body with a machine, and replace the thermostat around the bimetallic strip with some other kind of mechanism. It makes no difference.

So a brain is only "intelligent" in certain (but infinite) contexts as opposed to intelligence as an inherent property of a brain?

If so, your definition of "intelligence" is incomplete. What are those contexts? Can you really generalize all of those contexts for all possible intelligence systems? That sounds like an epistemological nightmare.

Intelligence is not an inherent property of a brain, brains are only intelligent when placed in particular configurations with supporting hardware. Are you going to fart at me too?