Arts and Minds

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.

Cryptospontaneous Generation

I don’t believe in evil or in daemons, yet as we have been reminded, the accidental accumulation of little daemons lies in the details. As errors combine and their details accumulate, there is increased potential that at some critical moment the heap will slide and all the little errors, once un-noticed, will identify themselves by cascading, contributing to some sort of entangled disaster. Most errors are born the way my grandmother believed house-flies were born—by cryptospontaneous generation. She was wrong about house-flies and cockroaches but would have been somewhat right about data-bugs and data-corruption involving media age and cosmic rays. These accidents during birth and senescence cause little evil data-daemons. Heisenberg and the cosmos are about as spontaneous as we can get in a deterministic universe. Mix lots of details, accidents, and bugs over time and what do you get? Flies.

The Rookie and the Geezer

I never liked baseball. Got hit in the head a lot because I was so nearsighted that I could never see the ball unless it was in my hand. I had no idea where it was in the sky until it blew up my tortoise framed eyeglasses. Before I was twelve I decided that balls were flying bombs and contrived to lose my first-baseman’s glove (although it did smell wonderful). I gave my baseball to a friend and thus never learned to spit.

Years later I bought a basketball. It was a bigger ball so I thought it would be easier to see, but in play it moved very fast, and when it hit me, it zonked my whole head, and my eyeglasses, and my right knee. Something told me to stop fooling with my balls, I gave the basketball away and consequently failed to learn two important skills of the American athlete— I can’t either dribble or spit.