| > Yet cars are much more intelligent today than they were in the 1970s Therein lies the problem. Your definition of intelligence presumes that it is a simple quantitative scale, measuring I guess, something like "system complexity". The relevant sense here, in which no progress has been made, is qualitative -- ie., it is a distinct property. And this property has not been acquired. What is the property? It is dynamical, not formal. It is more like gravity (, pregnancy) than it is like addition. It is the ability many animals have of adaption in the shifting and challenging environments in which they are embedded. That type of adaption is not formal: it is not adaption in the sense of "updating a weight parameter". Rather, of the cells of their bodies coordinating themselves differently, and thus of their tissues, and thus of their organs, and thus of their whole brain-body system. Both from a top-down command ("I want to run now, and so my cells...") and from a bottom-up ("my cells... so I ..."). What enables animals to be fully embedded in their physical environment, to cope and adapt to its radical shifts, is this capacity. The type of "crossword puzzle" "intelligence" we obsess with is entirely derivative of this more basic --and vastly more powerful -- intelligence. Cognition is just a semi-formal process, parasitical on the body's intelligence; whose role is simply to notice when it fails and problem-solve it. We have, at best, merely the architecture of this formal reasoning. But there is still nothing for it to reason about. And in this sense, computer science has made no progress -- and indeed, cannot. It is not a formal problem. |