Arts and Minds

Intelligence and Adaptability in Systems

My son Nova Spivack ( http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2008/02/a-classificatio.html?cid=103805366#comments ) has brought up the subject of developing a universal classification of intelligence. It is a worthwhile effort, and one that may require a century of reflection and research. It is worth more and serious work. Others have and will attempt it as well, and agreement will be slow and hard to achieve.

One problem is that we do not yet have a workable non-universal (species- our own) description of intelligence. My own questions are — What do we mean by intelligence? What are we getting at when we measure it or write about it? Much of the literature seems to confuse intelligence with 'smarts' (see my own previous posting on this blog — Is Intelligence A Property of All Life?)

I wonder if a useful way of discussing intelligence might be to consider it as an aspect of adaptability and a part of all biological process, and extend that into inorganic systems as well.

This dumps us into the possibility that intelligence evolved out of simple primal and basic properties of inorganic and organic systems in the early universe (at least on our planet, and in it’s high form (homo-sapiens) it is merely an extension of those simpler capacities for adaptability and change.

In this context intelligence is a scale of what can change or adapt in any examined system, ecosystem or species and how rapidly (in a comparative sense) this takes place. For instance, what is the scope and depth of possible change and adaptability in a molecule or virus and how does this scale up as systems become more complex? What terminology might we use to consider all this in a fresh perspective and to avoid the language and conceptual pitfalls hidden within our classical and current definitions and research?

Is Intelligence A Property of All Life?

Is intelligence is a basic feature of life? What do we mean when we speak or write about intelligence? There are at least a few working definitions, one is humans know it when they encounter it, as in the Turing test. Another is that human intelligence marks the top of a scale of animal intelligence. Casual language about intelligence usually confuses it with smartness, and is a competitive notion.

I wonder if intelligence is not a more profound aspect of all life, present in every living organism and at every scale. We may find a more useful idea of intelligence if we give intelligence some wiggle-room. I also wonder if intelligence is a fundamental property of life. Could any organism function without some level of intelligent or orderly information transfer and exchange within it's boundaries? Isn't information transfer and exchange a basic operation within intelligence? Perhaps an organelle or a virus does not aspire to the label highly intelligent, but it gets it's own job done.

Artificial Intelligence Requires Emotional Mediation

Artificial intelligence will never be intelligent in the human sense until we find a way of organizing machine process, storage and retrieval that is mediated by an emotion-emulating algorithm.

Information moving about within our brains, even what we believe to be pure logical thought and fact is attached to emotional preferences and dislikes (intellectual passions if you like), and these emotional tags or neurological links assist us in making efficient and meaningful use of the primary sensory chaos present in the unprocessed perceived environment. Emotion plus other data equals meaning, and meaning is everything in both thought and emotion, and in action or communication.

Comprehending what meaning means aught to be our main target as we pursue the grail of artificial intelligence. We can eventually understand and build an operational concept of meaning, but it will be difficult (or maybe impossible) if we only stick to the computer science worldview. The difficulty will be somewhat eased if computer scientists go to lunch with psychotherapists who teach and use psychodynamic theory.

In a simple mind experiment, think of an idea or a theory, perhaps some fact or strong belief you have been working with. Are you fond of it? Do you defend this belief or theory when colleagues challenge it’s validity in meetings? Your defense is not purely logical. It is also strongly emotional.

We are motivated by emotion first, logic second. We store away and remember our observations and scientific ideas with ‘tags’ that connect emotion to logical thought.

If computation is ever to be deeply companionable with humans, we must build computers that process data the way humans feel and think, this is not improbable. Because they exist together within the brain, emotions, logically, must be merely another quality or kind of information in the brain in the same way as are logical propositions.

Emotion is not a halo of irrational spiritual vapor hovering outside our brains. It is more likely central to the brain’s own deep logic. Perhaps emotion is a faster pathway to learning and remembering in animals, including humans, and will eventually provide the same functions within computer systems and their application programs.

Perhaps, if we keep our minds open this avenue of investigation may also lead to a better understanding of the mysterious process of human thought and emotion.

INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENTS

Fear, isolation, and a sense of numbing helplessness characterize the nursing home, the mental hospital and other institutional experiences for the majority of inmates. To enter a hospital, especially a mental hospital or a nursing home, either as a visitor or a patient, is to encounter an environment that has no equal in barrenness anywhere in our culture except for the prisoner's cell.

These environments may be described as dis-integrated or degraded because they lack wholeness; they are incomplete. Because the ordinary everyday settings for behavior are missing, they cannot adequately support the great range of human activities and behaviors that are associated with everyday life and particularly with the recovery process. Most institutions force inmates to ‘kill time’ without purpose. More typically and destructively, institutional environments may further impair the patients' faith in their own competence to take care of themselves and live normal independent lives. Prolonged institutionalization or hospitalization, especially in a mental hospital, nursing home, or prison may seriously impair the inmate’s mental health, as individual’s responsibilities and social behaviors fall away.

Psychiatry and psychology in particular, and medicine in general, all lack a clear vision or theory of mental health and ‘wellness’, as distinct from illness, that could inform and enrich the lives of patients in their care. Since the earliest records of institutional mental health treatment there have been relatively few reform revolutions during which the quality of the patients' experience, their environment, and their care were given enriching humane attention.

ALEX And Like-Minded Birds: Environmental Determinants In The Occurrence of Rival-Model Learning Among Four Birds.

Comparisons among four birds, their early development and behavioral determinants.

ALEX, our finest feathered colleague in the Laboratory of Cognitive Scientist Dr. Irene Pepperberg has died before his work, or hers, was completed. He was somewhat of an avian guru, a teacher, who participated in the Rival-Model learning method, ultimately developing clear human speech. He helped us answer many important questions about cognition and learning in general. He left Dr. Peppergerg and the rest of us who knew him and followed his progress with even more questions about the still largely unexplored animal-to-human interface.

Following the death of ALEX it seems the right moment to sum up some of my own informal observations about the linguistic and emotional language behavior of our own grays in the light of recent Rival-Model Learning discoveries.

ALEX, early years and environment:

ALEX was raised in Dr. Pepperberg’s laboratory, surrounded by students and researchers who kept him busy, interacting nearly all day as they explored his cognitive abilities, and as he learned to use human language. His was a formal, academic society. He lived a life of protocols, affection, repetition of protocols, affection, rest, and he slept alone, retiring gratefully (or so he seemed to indicate) to his cage at night. He did this work five days or more per week for thirty years.

There were also times when he visited friends with Dr. Pepperberg for days at a time. There were hours spent in the care of avian veterinarian Dr. Marjorie McMillan. , and many hospital days in Chicago, There were times he was interviewed in the company of strangers in small rooms or many in large auditoriums; he did not often disappoint.

He befriended Alan Alda, and it appears that ALEX impressed him, but more to the point ALEX made Alda laugh. That Alda laugh—that easy accepting sound—that accompanies so much of what he does, expresses his curiosity, and his pleasure in discovery. ALEX seems to have provided him with all of this in each meeting. Documented evidence of ALDA’s intelligent use of human language can be found on the Discovery Channel, and on video.

Nashi, early years and environment:

Nashi, my own African Grey Parrot is the same species (Psittacus erithacus) as ALEX, but she has had a different kind educational history, physical setting and social environment. Nashi’s life has not only been unlike ALEX’s, but also quite different from the lives of most domestically raised African Gray Parrots, and radically different from her conspecifics in wild flocks.

ALEX, Scientific Pioneer

Saturday, September 8, 2007

ALEX died yesterday, he was 31 years old and had lived the most extraordinary life of any bird on the planet. He was the first avian intellectual pioneer, and certainly the first avian to have made intellectual contributions to science. He was also an imp with a sense of humor that bordered on the ironic and mocking. Meeting ALEX was like meeting a little smart alien that fell from between the pages of a science fiction novel.

ALEX received his name from Dr. Irene Pepperberg (see the left column under THINKERS, on this blog) when as an ordinary uneducated one year old African Gray Parrot (Psittacus erithacus) he was purchased from a pet dealer to become a research subject in 1977. ALEX is an acronym for Avian Language Experiment. Irene at that time was beginning her work as a cognitive scientist and had the idea that because of this species celebrated language-learning abilities, working with a bird might prove to be a direct way of investigating cognition and learning in an animal model.

Everybody’s Out Of Step But You

As a child I often felt humiliated by a parent or teacher who used the phrase 'everybody’s out of step but you' in response to my questions, beliefs, or criticisms of the world around me, or in reaction to my own actions. It is a dangerous phrase, one that assumes the correctness of the assumptions upon which it is based, and the context out of which it arises.

BOUNDARIES: A Field-Guide To The Associative Nature Of Our Own Minds.

The brain has no hard edges; neither does information. There are no gray interior walls to prevent ideas from wandering across the boundaries between and among fields. Many paths of curiosity lead to intellectual, artistic and scientific questioning, and onward to understanding. For many of us and for our children, these curious pathways are barred by signs that say: “Private Property—Do Not Enter Without Permission”). In the words of a song: “We have to be carefully taught.”

Breaking Boundaries - The Syncretic Mind In Search Of Meaning

One Node in a Network of Thought-Experiments, Hypotheses, and Essays

© Mayer Spivack 1996

Definitions of the term syncretic loosely extracted from the Random House Dictionary of the English language give us the following understanding: “Syn-cre-tism...1. the attempted reconciliation or union of different or opposing principles, practices, or parties, as in philosophy or religion. 2. Gram. The merging, as by historical change in a language, of two or more categories in a specified environment into one...”

In a series of posts, beginning with this one, I will publish thoughts and essays on syncretic and associative learning that I call "Breaking Boundaries". This writing will explore how meaning and creative process germinate and bloom in the mind. I offer the proposition that syncretic association is a mental process essential to both art and science, and suggest that it is the means by which our associative minds seek meaning in a world of disorganized raw information. Until we have detected some order within the chaos of raw experience, and have begun to form patterns that are significant to our understanding of that experience, we have only made simple percepts that are without meaning. I am exploring how the detection of pattern and order—the finding-out of cognizable features (that may be inherent in the fractal ‘raw’ experience of nature)—are synonymous with the detection and invention of meaning, and how they, together, may constitute the organic process of our creativity.