Anyway, the strip does contain the state of the world around it: the temperature is modeled by how much the bimetal is bent. I think indeed it is a minimal example of a complex system, one that at first glance defies explanation, it seems to have purpose (keep temp stable), until you understand the inside.
Anyway, "Is a virus alive?", "Are these specimens the same species?", ... Us humans like our boxes, but at the edges they almost always go wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimetallic_strip
Thermal expansion is clearly a physical reaction; if arranged in an intelligent way, it's able to achieve some human-relevant objective... but if we're going to say that two pieces of bulk metal hooked together is intelligent, then the term "intelligence" is so broad as to be roughly meaningless.
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.
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.
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).
Says the user who just made fart noises. Your confidence here is dunning.
Octopi don't even have a centralized brain.
> 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.
I think in a lot of these conversations people say consciousness and assume that consciousness always mirrors their own, which just so happens to come along with a sense of self for 99.9% of sober individuals. So I think it's important to distinguish between the two things.
You can set a definition and context so broad that everything and anything is intelligent.
The possibility of an outlandish alternative, does not does inform on if a consensus exists or not
It's useful in many ways to put a thermostat, an LLM, a monkey and a human on the same "intelligence"/"complexity" scale - there are many interesting things to discuss other than moral weight. And then, for discussing personhood, it makes no sense to include a thermostat.
Interjecting the perspective that words are meaningless constructs is rarely helpful. If someone wants directions, telling them that there is no concrete metaphysical concepts of north, south, left, or right, isnt constructive.
I think the heart of these more philosophical debates is a desire for fundamental truth, not just a useful mental model.
vs
> A bimetallic strip is intelligent
You're moving the goal posts
The broad definition is not justified by the fact that certain attempts to define the term would attribute intelligence to thermostats; a more useful conclusion to draw is that the definitions in question could be improved.
It is sometimes said that we won't be able to gain an understanding of intelligence until we have a precise definition, but it's actually the other way round: definitions get tighter as our understanding increases. We now understand many things that not only were lacking definitions in the past, but were not even imagined.
I use intelligence mostly just as perspective of analysis to a system. E.g. Can it be seen to process information? How complicated is the transform from the information to some action? Does the processing lead to some good outcome, e.g. self-preservation of the system? Could the information processing be improved for this outcome?
Any system processes information, and in a thermostat it is not complicated at all. Even the most self-aware thermostats currently being manufactured are not going to improve themselves on their own volition. Applying the term 'intelligence' this broadly turns it into an empty tautology, or a little piece of uninformative noise on a communications channel, no more useful in understanding those systems than in understanding actual intelligence.
> Intelligence is a very vague and very context dependent thing
That's either contradictory, to state that something has property X where X is vague to the point of undefined, or you are setting a very low bar for intelligence (I'm actually okay with the latter).
Just a question, if a bimetallic strip can be intelligent, is a marble intelligent for having the wit to find a low point on an uneven surface by rolling downwards?
Taken to the logical conclusion, we are all just rolling downwards to a minimum energy state just like the marble.
I don't think intelligence is an intrinsic, let alone binary, property of an object or a system.
Is this because it is a completely man-made system and not one that evolved slowly over time through natural processes?
Your brain is taking in a lot of information at the edges of your awareness, light, sounds, touch, etc. are all getting absorbed and transmitted to your brain. As that information is transmitted along your neurons it's getting summarized, then merged with other summarized information and summarized again. The brain is getting summaries of summaries, and developing a unified categorizing of the global state across all it's inputs.
Then the brain takes that summary and makes a prediction about the future state. The summarization is energy-efficient. By categorizing all that data into a global state you make decision making possible. "When my boss seems stressed all week, then calls a bunch of people one-by-one into his office on Friday afternoon, I know lay-offs are coming. I better polish up my resume." From "stress/anxiety/unease" in the environment to "danger is coming I need to fight/flight".
Your brain is taking that summary/categorization and figuring out what it needs to do next. If "X" happens then I should do "Y" to "stay-safe/get-food/find-a-mate". The brain is very good at capturing and summarizing data, and making a prediction because that process is much more efficient than doing otherwise. Instead of foraging everywhere for food and hoping I just bump into something that will provide sustenance, I know if X, Y, and Z happen then food will be "here", and I can get lots of it.
You can apply this same model to all actions the brain directs. It also helps make sense of why maladaptive behaviors develop. Sometimes the summary is incorrect, or was formed based on past information that no longer applies, and it may need to be unlearned.
The definition of intelligent I give is “to mitigate uncertainty.” If it does not mitigate uncertainty, it is not intelligent.
It is merely of constrained intelligence. Perhaps your expectations are too broad.
If the thermostat reacts appropriately to environmental changes then it is performing its role intelligently.
Intelligence is the mitigation of uncertainty.
The revelation of the light is information. Navigating the contours of darkness is intelligence.
If the cave walls glowed in response to proximity (of the observer) then the light source would have a modicum of intelligence.