Proin Drakenzol wrote:
me wrote:
sorry, but toasters fall under the "zero-int" category too. They don't think for themselves, everything is purely mechanical, and a toaster can't turn itself on at its own discretion.
If it had a(n) (electronic) brain and could do things of
its own free will then it would be intellegent. A toaster has no control over itself, everything it does is in reaction to outside
physical forces and (unless it is broken) it and all other toasters always perform the same action(s) when the same forces are applied.
As Tamayo mentioned earlier, "intelligence" is not well defined, but the way the word is usually used not equivilent to free will. Intelligence varies from low (limited) to high (free), and how can you have a limited amount of free will? We're most familiar with intelligence going hand-in-hand with free will, but there's really no reason the two have to be linked. Your self-activating toaster would have free will, but if all it could do was make a binary decision to turn itself on or off, it would not be intelligent.
With regard to the ability to learn and self-program, what about adaptive systems? They alter their internal state until they achieve some feedback condition. They've been around since the 1940s but I think we can agree that the analog phone system is not intelligent in a meaningful way.
Likewise, nearly every animal can recognize and react to danger. (Fire, predators, etc.) But we don't consider them the moral equivalents of a human.
(Well, <i>I</i> don't anyway...)
On a more practical tangent, great apes <i>do</i> appear to have a near-human level of ... err ... human consciousness. Should we consider them to be fellow sophonts or some fraction thereof? Accepting a continuum definition of consciousness and relative worth can be <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_compromise">manifestly unfair</a>, but a rigid binary definition can also lead to <a href="http://www.newshounds.us/2005/02/09/killer_instinct.php">inanity around the lower boundary</a>.
Myself, I'm going to stick with the "I know it when I see it" definition of a sophont for now.