What Are Intelligence? And Why?

Randall Davis

Summary

Randall Davis presents "definitions" for intelligence and why intelligence exists. The definitions of intelligence come from the five areas of study looked at by artificial intelligence researchers: mathematics (logic), psychology, biology, statistics, and economics. Logicists view intelligence through formal calculations of logical rules. Psychologists view intelligence as human behavior. In biology, intelligence is viewed as a response-stimuli behavior based on the physiological architecture. Statistics provides a probability theory approach, and economics presents an approach based on utility theory.

Davis proceeds to explain possible reasons why intelligence exists through an exploration of how the human mind evolved. Fossil records show that the encephalization quotient (ratio of brain size to body size) of human ancestors began to increase over four million years ago. However, early man did not begin developing tools and language skills until 300,000 years ago. He points out a number of theories why this may be. He also notes that evolution is more of random search than a goal-oriented process, and that the products of evolution are often messy and multifaceted.

A number of examples of animal intelligence are presented. These examples serve as to point out difference in intelligence, while also showing similarity between animal intelligence and human intelligence. The goal being to find ways to uncover aspects of human intelligence by investigating simpler forms of intelligence in animals.

He concludes the paper with an exploration of the idea that we think by "reliving." He explains evidence for how we create concrete visual ideas in our mind. In order to answer questions of what would happen, we picture in our mind visually how something would play out to answer these questions.

Discussion

I enjoyed this reading. It contains a lot of interesting information about areas that I know only a small amount about. I found it very captivating to look at how different areas look at human intelligence, and to theorize how it came about through evolution-based analysis. My only questions are:

• How can we apply these different views of intelligence?
• How can we integrate the views?
• Are certain AI tasks better suited for specific models of intelligence? In other words, is the one view or combination of views that would work best to address a specific focus topic within artificial intelligence?

The view of human intelligence formed from a messy layering of evolutionary forces is a nice take that makes sense to me. The complexity of human intelligence comes not only from how advanced it is, but also how complicated and inefficiently designed it is. It makes me think that looking at simpler animal intelligence is a good idea for building a basis for looking at human intelligence.