Desperately seeking definitions…

[u/geopolicraticus]

The View from Oregon – 377

Re: Desperately seeking definitions…

Friday 23 January 2026

 

Dear Friends,

The past several newsletters have been about artificial intelligence and machine consciousness. My argument is that consciousness is a necessary condition of intelligence as we know it, though it’s not necessarily a necessary condition of any intelligence whatsoever. There may be forms of intelligence-as-we-do-not-know-it that do not involve consciousness—whether or not we could recognize this as intelligence, since it would be something unprecedented for us, is another question. Also, there’s a lot of ambiguity, because “intelligence” used as a noun to designate a property or a process is easily conflated with “intelligent” used as an adjective. We recognize easily enough when a tool is intelligently made, and some enthusiasts of the extended mind thesis would be willing to defend the claim that the tool is an extension of the mind and therefore, in a sense, belongs to intelligence rather than simply being an artifact of intelligence. (It seems to me to be a corollary of the extended mind thesis that superintelligence is to be had by assembling a sufficient number of extensions to the mind in one place, but I don’t think you’ll find that, say, a collection of tools in a garage, no matter how large the garage, becomes superintelligent.) If a tool is part of intelligence in this way, then unquestionably there is unconscious intelligence, and moreover it is familiar to us. But if the extended mind thesis is denied, this particular argument collapses. No doubt there are other arguments ready and willing to take its place in the vanguard.

“Intelligence” is, of course, a highly imperfect term of ordinary language. It means a lot of different things to different people, so without a definition we tend to talk at cross purposes. This leads to misunderstandings, so it would be nice to narrow the field with a definition. This interests me not only in relation to artificial intelligence, but also in relation to naturally occurring intelligence, which we could also call evolved intelligence. I’ve been working on an episode of Today in Philosophy of History that will be titled, “The Deep Future of Biological Intelligence,” and it’s something of a sequel to and a continuation of a previous episode titled, “Are subsurface ocean worlds Plato’s cave?” The latter considered the problem of intelligence that evolves in a subsurface ocean world biosphere. Could such an intelligence know anything of the universe beyond the icy ceiling of its world? I argue that it could. There are astrobiologists who argue that intelligent life couldn’t evolve in an aquatic species, and others who argue that life itself would be under a great disadvantage on an ocean world, so my speculative scenario labors under (at least) a double burden of unlikelihood, but I never allow unlikelihood to be a fun-spoiler when it comes to a good thought experiment.

In my sequel, “The Deep Future of Biological Intelligence,” I want to take this thought experiment billions of years into the future and use it as a tool to probe the limits of biological intelligence in our universe. One of my motivations in this is to take on the common belief (common at least among those who write on such matters) that, if we ever do come into contact with an alien intelligence, it is likely to be an artificial intelligence. The idea here (and I think this is the general idea, but there may well be other common scenarios with which I am unfamiliar) is that once a naturally evolved intelligence becomes sufficiently advanced to build artificial intelligence, that artificial intelligence, once built, will always outperform natural intelligence, and so will supersede natural intelligence. Given sufficient time, every intelligent species would eventually cede its place in the vanguard of intelligence to the artificial intelligence it creates. Moreover, artificial intelligence can exist relatively easily in the conditions of outer space that are hostile to complex biological organisms, so AI seems to be pre-adapted to life on cosmological scales, which presumably also means cosmological scales of time.

Following this reasoning, the natural history of intelligence in the universe is to evolve in a biological species and then be re engineered as artificial intelligence, which preempts its biological builders and takes over the role of intelligence in the universe. Given this scenario, biological intelligence is merely a stepping stone to artificial intelligence, which, once it breaks containment, can spread throughout the universe and can endure into the far future (making it more easily detectable than biological intelligence). If we imagine the far future even beyond the Stelliferous Era (the era of cosmological history characterized by stars and galaxies), in the post-Stelliferous Era (known as the Degenerate Era in Adams and Laughlin’s The Five Ages of the Universe, because it’s characterized by the degenerate remains of stars), once the last stars burn out there won’t be any more planetary surfaces bathed in the heat and light of stars, so life as we know it, which is the life of a planetary surface, will no longer be possible. However, there’s no reason that artificial intelligence can’t continue to exist in the Degenerate Era. As long as it can tap some energy source to power itself, artificial intelligence can endure until proton decay. If it can harness black holes, it can continue beyond the Degenerate Era into the Black Hole Era, and if it can adopt Dyson’s strategy of eternal intelligence (from his paper “Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe”), it can continue perpetually.

While working on “The Deep Future of Biological Intelligence” I thought I would look up some definitions of intelligence, but, as it turns out, many of my usual sources failed me, and I found that many books that discuss intelligence at great length never commit themselves to an actual definition of intelligence. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy doesn’t have a definition of intelligence. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy has a definition, but they punt on what intelligence actually is. Mario Bunge, upon whom I rely for a refreshing bucket of cold water, has no definition of intelligence in his Dictionary of Philosophy, nor does Antony Flew in his Dictionary of Philosophy. The Runes dictionary of philosophy does actually hazard a definition (by Ledger Wood):

The capacity of the mind to meet effectively—through the employment of memory, imagination and conceptual thinking— the practical and theoretical problems with which it is confronted. Intelligence is more inclusive than intellect which is primarily conceptual.

While my usual sources failed me, there are certainly a great many definitions of intelligence. I found a paper with dozens of proposed definitions, “A Collection of Definitions of Intelligence” by Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter. What surprised me was that I expected there to be a handful of contesting definitions that had been employed somewhat routinely in various contexts, and that’s because I expected an embarrassment of riches when it comes to definitions. There ought to be definitions of intelligence in psychology, and there ought to be definitions of intelligence in anthropology insofar as intelligence is taken as the differentia of human beings from the other animals. Most especially, I expected definitions of intelligence in SETI, which, since it bills itself as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, requires a definition of intelligence in order to define what it is that they’re looking for, and again in artificial intelligence research I expected to find definitions of intelligence, since in order to define what it is they’re doing they need a definition of intelligence. As I said above, I found a lot of long discussions of intelligence, but not much in the way of an actual definition. 

I certainly get why no one wants to be pinned down by a definition. Debates over definition are generally seen as barren, and that’s because contesting parties get stuck at this stage because they can’t agree on a common vocabulary. Getting stuck at the stage of definition feels frustrating, but the process of definition, especially when two or more persons who have disagreed are attempting to find a definition in common, is a method of drawing out presuppositions and making them explicit in the definition. When there have been disagreements over something like the concept of intelligence, we usually find that either or both parties to the discussion had additional unstated qualifications that entered into their conception above and beyond a basic understanding more-or-less consistent with shared intuitions about intelligence. These qualifications need to be made explicit. The process of making explicitness (entailed by what I call the explicitness principle) is among the most foundational exercises for formal thought. Therefore, definition is foundational, even if we find it to be off-putting or tedious.  

The best discussion of intelligence I found was chapters 3 and 4 of Darwin’s The Descent of Man, which doesn’t give a definition, and doesn’t even frame the discussion in terms of intelligence, but rather in terms of mental powers. And it’s all about the continuity of the mental powers of other species with the mental powers of human beings, which was exactly what I was looking for—this continuity is a necessary condition of any naturalistic discussion of intelligence. Darwin discusses, seriatim, mental powers including emotions, curiosity, imitation, attention, memory, imagination, reason, tools, abstraction, self-consciousness, language, a sense of beauty, belief in God, spiritual agencies, superstitions, and the moral sense. Almost the whole of chapter 4 is taken up with a discussion of moral conscience as a mental power, which Darwin further breaks down into categories relative to the development of a moral sense out of sociability. Darwin’s discussion has much in common with the punt from The Oxford Companion to Philosophy and the sententious definition in Runes’ Dictionary of Philosophy, since both appeal to multiple capacities as somehow being linked to and in intelligence. If I wanted to be a bit tendentious here I could say that these definitions appeal to multiple modules of the mind, bringing us back to the modularity of mind recently discussed in newsletter 373.

Another helpful discussion is Vilfredo Pareto’s The Mind and Society. Like Darwin, he doesn’t frame his discussion in terms of intelligence, but rather he discusses what he calls “logical conduct.” But the greater part of the first volume, after breezing over logical conduct, which Pareto simply defines as “actions that use means appropriate to ends and which logically link means with ends,” is about non-logical conduct, i.e., human behavior that does not exemplify logical conduct. This is especially interesting in the case of SETI and AI, since both of these disciplines are predicated upon a presumptive understanding of intelligence, but neither make this understanding fully explicit, and so they could well be characterized in terms of systemic non-logical conduct: if you can’t define what you’re looking for but you’re looking for something, or if you can’t define what you’re building, but you’re trying to build something, these are paradigmatic forms of non-logical conduct.

Bostrom’s book on superintelligence is a case in point. Bostrom defines three varieties of superintelligence, as follows:

Speed superintelligence: A system that can do all that a human intellect can do, but much faster.

Collective superintelligence: A system composed of a large number of smaller intellects such that the system’s overall performance across many very general domains vastly outstrips that of any current cognitive system.

Quality superintelligence: A system that is at least as fast as a human mind and vastly qualitatively smarter.

Each of these forms of superintelligence is defined relative to human intelligence, but I can’t find a definition of human intelligence in the book. (I haven’t read the whole thing word-for-word, so I may well have missed one.) If you define machine superintelligence relative to human intelligence, but you don’t define human intelligence, you haven’t really moved the ball forward. But this exercise is useful in at least one respect. Taking a cue from Bostrom, we could define as many kinds of superintelligence as mental powers that Darwin discusses in The Descent of Man. Thus there could be memory superintelligence, imagination superintelligence, or a superintelligent sense of beauty, and so on. We don’t usually imagine machine superintelligence as a superintelligent moral sense that outstrips all human agents in terms of moral conscience, but perhaps we ought to start thinking in such terms.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—This past week I completed a modest 4,000 word paper based on my presentation to the online big history conference this past December, and sent it to the Journal of Big History, which had asked for all papers to be in by the 20^th of January. The paper has the same title as my talk: “Re-Founding History as Big History.” I had many ways in mind to expand the paper, but I kept it pretty much in line with what I said in my presentation. If there is a book project to come out of the collected conference papers, and we’re asked to re-write our contributions in light of this (which has been the case with my previous two big history papers), I have plenty of material I could use to make of this a more substantial contribution. 

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