The Elements of Intelligence

Can machines ever be sentient? Could they perceive and feel things, be conscious of their surroundings? What are the prospects of achieving sentience in a machine? What are the dangers associated with such an endeavor, and is it even ethical to embark on such a path to begin with? In the series of articles of this column, I discuss one possible path toward “general intelligence” in machines: to use the process of Darwinian evolution to produce artificial brains that can be grafted onto mobile robotic platforms, with the goal of achieving fully embodied sentient machines.After reviewing the history of Artificial Intelligence research (Adami, 2021) and discussing the components, topology, and optimization methods used in artificial neural network research (Adami, 2022), we now take a step back to ask ourselves, What is intelligence? In our quest to evolve an intelligent system, this is not an idle question. In fact, asking this question will help us focus on essential features of what we call intelligence, rather than being distracted by incidental attributes. Our answer will be guided by the principle that intelligence is an evolutionary response to uncertain environments: that the primary purpose of intelligence is to increase the organism’s fitness.Just as it is unlikely that there will ever be a unique and universal definition of intelligence, it is also unlikely that there will be widespread agreement about what the processes are that contribute to intelligence: the elements of intelligence. The five elements that I will discuss here are rooted in the idea that intelligence is a (biological or computational) trait that enables its bearer to reduce the uncertainty about the world in which it lives (both in time and space) and harness the information it has gained to succeed against its competitors, cooperate with its supporters, and extract the resources it needs from its environment without coming to harm. Recognizing who is friend and who is foe (and using information to defeat the foe and support the friend) ultimately leads to a greater number of offspring.To leverage information in support of organismal fitness, the organism needs to perceive the environment; extract the salient features (those that matter to the organism and can be perceived by its sensory system); make predictions and plans based on the sensed world as well as on what was learned from experience; and, finally, act according to those predictions.1 Such a view of intelligence is very much aligned with the “knowledge-level systems” view of the late 20th century (Anderson, 1983; Newell, 1990), except that those attempts to formulate a “unified theory of cognition” made no attempt to quantify said knowledge in terms of information. An information-theoretic view of intelligence and cognition has the advantage that it can quantify the relation between the “symbols” manipulated by the knowledge system and the things in the physical world that they represent. This is important because, historically, one of the most common criticisms of attempts to formalize (and ultimately engineer) thinking systems conjured up an apparent dichotomy between the “zeros and ones” of computer systems, which are devoid of intrinsic meaning (“strings by themselves can’t have any meaning”; Searle, 1984, p. 31), and the fact that “thoughts are about things.” Information theory quantifies precisely that link, both in computers and in people.Whereas most theories of cognition posit that sensing and acting are integral elements of intelligence because they are clearly part of the “sensory–action loop” (Bongard Clark, 2016; Newell, 1990), here I take the point of view that the sensors and motors themselves are “given” (even though cognition does affect sensing and acting), and I discuss only the elements of intelligence that take place within the neurons of the brain, excluding sensors and motors (often called “peripheral neurons”; McCulloch see, e.g., Feynman, 1974), is without a doubt a complex one, involving (as I will describe) a shift from perceptual characters that are described by continuous values to conceptual ones described by discrete values. For discrete categories, Shannon’s (1948) uncertainty function is given byH(X)=−∑i=1np(xi)logp(xi),(1)where p(xi) is the likelihood of encountering an object within category xi in world X. In general, the number of categories (as well as the “distance” between different categories) depends on how useful the differentiation is. For example, in some situations, it might be relevant to make a distinction between two categories (say, “chair“ and “stool”) that is not necessary in others. In other words, the brain tends to operate with just the categories that are necessary to best understand (and predict) the world, given the particular circumstances.How do categories emerge? This is a difficult question to answer, because although they clearly emerge over time via a process of use, feedback, and learning, those processes themselves are somewhat vague. Furthermore, some categories are clearly innate: The fear of the color red in certain birds (Pryke, 2009) is one such example. In a very real sense, categories evolve. 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