Reply to post: Re: Its not intelligent

Re: Its not intelligent

Okay, thanks for the clarification.

"Sentience" is a rather broad term - it may mean anything from "capable of sensory perception" to "consciousness" (whatever that means).

> The word sentient being highly important as non sentient do not possess intelligence.

For me, that is both vague (see above) and offered without justification or evidence. It reads to me more like your definition of intelligence, rather than simply a prerequisite - which feels rather circular.

> I believe that only a biological being can be sentient in nature.

Again, that's a very strong contention, which to my mind requires some serious justification. Which aspect(s) of biology -- which presumably exclude technological constructs (and technology is already blurring those lines) -- does that assertion rest on? Is it the biological substrate (neural systems, etc.)? The evolutionary back-story? Some mysterious "élan vital"? Something else?

> And yes it therefore covers other biological things more than just Human Being's, we can easilly consider Dolphins, Octopus etc as being intelligent.

Right, I'm certainly prepared to consider primates, dolphins, octopuses, corvids, ... as "intelligent" (for some values of the term), but, tellingly, to take one example, octopus "intelligence" seems very, very different to the human/primate variety. Their sensorium, for one things, is radically different, as is their neural processing machinery, which is distributed (including in the individual tentacles!) through its body.

Octopuses, one might say, have a strikingly alien form of intelligence. And I suspect any artificial intelligence which might in future be universally accepted as such, may well be alien rather than human-like.

Apart from which, biology spans a spectrum of sentience/intelligence. We might recognise an octopus as intelligent, but how about a rat, a lizard, a shark, a bee, ... ? The same, I should imagine, will be the case for artificial intelligence. It won't necessarily appear with a bang, but may rather (without wanting to sound sinister) creep up on us.

[For some personal context, I am a mathematician working in a consciousness science research centre -- these days I mostly develop methods for analysing neuroimaging data -- and also have a background in evolution theory.]