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Comment by cJ0th | Hacker News Reader

That's an interesting thought. It's like they posses "artificial intelligence", i.e. they behave like the famous paper clip maximizer.

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No, that's just evolution - plain, simple and extremely dumb. Viruses don't really "want" anything, they are just biomolecular machines that run around replicating themselves and screwing things up; some manage to copy themselves, some don't - and this way, generation after generation, you're left with those viruses that are good at copying themselves in the environment they're in. Evolution is a statistical phenomenon.

Except that, depending on your definition of "intelligence", evolution even as a statistical process fits most to all of the criteria necessary to be intelligent. Basically any definition of intelligence that fits the stuff you see in the movies will also tend to fit evolution. "Has goals, biases set of possible futures toward completing those goals, demonstrates creativity", and so on. It's just that evolution, as an intelligent entity, is utterly, unbelievably alien - psychologically, physically, and 'physiologically'. Which I guess makes sense, right? Aliens aren't going to have rubber foreheads and five fingers; they're going to be utterly unbelievably alien.

True, but it's a kind of a "null garbage collector" case. It's the dumbest type of intelligence, a random one. But it did also created intelligences less dumb than itself, if you view the evolutionary process as separate from the workings of human mind.

This splits into two points:

1. You're right, our intelligence is the same thing. Intellect is a statistical creation that makes us good at surviving.

2. But usually, when people talk about our intelligence and our having goals, they aren't talking about the fact that we statistically exhibit tendencies towards self-preservation (which is what we're talking about viruses doing). It's that we literally have conceptual goals, which can be written down ahead of time and talked about.

aka you won't find a virus with a to-do list. Conflating that intelligence with viral 'intelligence' is kinda disingeuous.

That said, I do agree that we might/will find alien life that looks nothing like what we expect and has 'intelligence', for some reasonable (non-virus) definition.

I would not be inordinately surprised if we managed to find this in the motion of waves in the ocean, or in the swirling gases of the sun, or the gravitational interactions of the asteroid belt, or in tremors in the earth, or in hive-minds of billions of ants. And I definitely reject dualism and fully expect that a human brain simulated in a computer would be as intelligent as we are.

I'm not sure what the criteria for an 'intelligence medium' is, but it seems to require sufficiently high entropy to allow for complex patterns to form, but not too high - there has to be enough order and especially a not-too-high temperature such that self-contained systems can form and replicate without being blurred back into the whole system.

In other settings, a simple approximation of what Evolution does will balance your portfolio and find Nash Equilibriums for zero sum games much more quickly than linear programming (query: multiplicative update evolution).

Having to wait for things to die can be restrictive (but genomes are declarative, what does that buy?). Roughly, with what amounts to the assumption that Lamarckian evolution is more or less not true, you can characterize evolution's learning power as almost as good as PAC (query: statistical query learning evolution).