eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) (11/23/88)
>In article <151@feedme.UUCP> doug@feedme.UUCP (Doug Salot) asks: >would somebody from sci.lang care to give us a few more words for intelligence? I'm not from sci.lang, but try this one out: What I've come to admire as intelligence is the capacity to understand the nature of one's limitations, and through that understanding to construct alternative approaches to whichever goal one has undertaken to acheive. Where real intelligence begins, I think, is the capacity to apply this idea to itself, that is, the capacity to assess the machinery of discrimination and criticism itself. I surmise that a finite level of recursion is sufficient to justify intelligent behaviour. As an example, supposing that my goal is to displace an enormous pile of dirt in the course of an afternoon. I may know that it takes me an afternoon to displace a fraction of the total amount. The questions are, how would I know this if I haven't tried, and how do I arrive at the idea of a shovel. I invite discussion of this matter.