OTOH, English really needs another word, meaning "like intelligence, but it could be simulated by an analog computer with a good handful of of discrete components".
Think the issue is what constitutes 'intelligence' at all. Forget computers.
This article breaks down how the cell behaves down the the molecules. Once each part is pulled apart and examined, where did the 'intelligence' go.
The single cell, looks 'intelligent'. But, when it is all pulled apart we don't find it. It is just chemicals, reactions, physics.
Then, scale that up to multi-cellular organism, then human, its all just mechanistic, chemicals, physics. So where did the intelligence come from? Humans are also just twitching flagella.
This article just makes it a more stark idea, because a single cell appears 'intelligent', but we can pull it apart and examine the constitutive parts, the chemical, molecules.
So there is not much wiggle room for philosophy or souls. It looks intelligent, but look, we can peer under a microscope and don't see the intelligence.
Compare with an OS kernel: individual code snippets are useless / meaningless.
Executed by some CPU or VM, each snippet can be seen to modify that machine's state.
Snippets put together may be observed, and understood as implementing some specific algorithm. Again: useless / meaningless in isolation.
Some snippets may be seen to address I/O, and so it may be assumed to be part of a subsystem that controls (or is controlled by) a peripheral device.
Now put all those parts together, and you have an intricate piece of machinery that shows flexible, adaptable, goal-oriented behaviour. Behaves in a 'smart' way (for varying definitions of 'smart').
Where did the intelligence come from? The parts' properties, how they're put together, and their interactions (among themselves & their environment).
As science progresses, I think we'll come to realize it's just that: a matter of scale & how the many parts and variables interact with their environment. No magic (but fascinating & wonderful nonetheless).
> So there is not much wiggle room for philosophy or souls. It looks intelligent, but look, we can peer under a microscope and don't see the intelligence.
Sure, but we still can't replicate its behavior in a natural environment, just simple lab environments.
E. coli does a lot more things than what is described in the article, the article just gives an extremely simplified view of the cells intelligence. They react to all sorts of substances in reality and decides where to go based on all of those, not just a simple "go towards good place" behavior. It is cool that they mapped out how it behaves in a simple environment, but you can do the same thing with humans, if you put a human in a simple experiment you can create similarly simple rules for human behavior.
And even if you just look at the behavior described in the article that would still require quite a bit of components since you would need to accumulate signals and normalize them and then turn that to oscillating control signals. Computing via chemical processes like cells do makes the computations a lot simpler.
Um...I'm suspecting that you want to argue with someone whose worldview is rather unlike mine. And our notions of how many components are in a "good handful" may also differ rather widely. Thanks, OO.
> I'm suspecting that you want to argue with someone whose worldview is rather unlike mine.
Probably, but I can only respond to the words you write and not your internal thoughts. To me a handful is 10 or less, from fingers, but I guess a handful could also be hundreds like hundreds of rice grains which makes more sense but I haven't seen anyone use handful for more than 10.
Sure, a DC full of computers can fully simulate a sucrose molecule at a detailed level of description. You wouldn't need a DC- it could be done on a single machine. The real question is, why would you need to model things at the molecular level of detail if that detail is not necessary to recapitulate the behavior of a cell?
One thng I've learned from over a decade of simulating proteins and nucleic acids is that those methods, while mathematically interesting, don't provide useful data given the amount of resources they require. Instead, reduced models (effectively embeddings) and careful statistical methods are much, much more productive.
How does a water droplet "know" the path downhill. How does electricity "know" the least resistance path.
All this language is just confusing. In a chemical gradient sense, molds and yeasts solve tough problems all the time, but it's not much more than physics
How many simple physics combinations until you get intelligence? Remember that you are made of cells, and everything you do (probably) can be reduced to a group effect of your cells.
Useful languages can succinctly distinguish things which are qualitatively quite different. Describing everything in the world as "intelligent" sounds kinda cool and Zen, and may reflect some peoples' worldviews - but it also make "intelligent" pretty useless as an adjective.
Intelligence is not well defined enough for a succinct distinguishment. At least, not colloquially.
But also we're in a context where acknowledging the intelligence of other life forms is pretty radical so distinguishing them as 'lesser' than human would be precisely opposite of the point. The baseline world view is that human intelligence is magically different than other animal intelligences.
1) It's a poorly defined word that means different things to different people
2) The word "mechanism" perfectly describes what it is
At the end of the day it's just using the detection of food, to switch from "tumble" (try a random direction to find food) to "run" (assume we're near, or in, a patch of food, and move forward to consume more).
If "hot" described any temperature from "the dark side of Pluto" to "the core of a brand-new neutron star" - then how useful a word would "hot" be, for communication between humans?
People tend to underestimated cells just like you do here.