[FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

[glen∈ℂ]

I struggled to find the proper branch of the thread-tree to place this post.  But I decided to do it, here, because your invocation of "organism" confirms my bias.  The inclusion of "consciousness" is a red herring, I think. And the expansion to "relations between entities", including "triads" is nice-to-have icing, but unnecessary[†].

The important part is, as Marcus pointed out with self-driving cars, and I tried to affirm, the glove *knows* hands just like a pattern recognizing AI knows the patterns it's been programmed to recognize. We've demonstrated that knowledge can be instantiated into objects/machines/animals/people. The term we use for that is "specific intelligence" these days, in order to distinguish those tasks/jobs that are straightforward to automate. Those difficult to automate jobs require general intelligence (GI).

The attribute of our current examples of GIs (animals and maybe even plants) that we long settled on is "alive" and the common term for the machines that exhibit GI is "organism". So I struggle to find a unique question in this thread that does NOT boil down to "what is life?"

What am I missing? Why are we talking about all these abstract things like "monism", "mind", "knowledge", "experience", "consciousness", and all that malarkey instead of the more biologically established things? How is this thread NOT about biology?


[†] The common term "ecology" and the pairwise, triadic, ..., N-ary, relations it implies seems sufficient without diving into semiotic hermeneutics.

On 4/27/19 11:10 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> As we talk, here, I am beginning to wonder if the minimal conditions for a ‘knowing” require co=ordination between two organisms.