Intel

We think of intelligence, and we realise that it is a fleeting thing, a will-o-wisp of conceptualisation. It has always been so, from the time of the prophet Isaiah — "Therefore once more I will astound these people with wonder upon wonder; the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish." (Isaiah 29:14)

And in this supposedly more enlightened, more intelligent, more rational age, intelligence is still a problem: as Arthur C Clarke put it, "It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value." This was eleven years ago.

Just last year, another famous scientist adjusted this position. Stephen Hawking: "It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value."

Why are such eminent and eminently intelligent men so leery of the value of intelligence? The point is trivial to them, and should be readily grasped by us. You can find it, for example, in the pseudonymous J Abner Peddiwell's The Saber-tooth Curriculum, published in 1939.

What is this trivial point? Quite simply put, we consider intelligence to be the ability to conceptualise and execute whatever gets us what we want. And since what we want is not always the same thing from era to era, intelligence is an illusive chimera. (Worse, sometimes it can't even get us what we want, because we have not the wit to figure out what we want.)

About 800 years after Isaiah, the apostle Paul translated him thus: "For it is written: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate." (I Corinthians 1:19)

This is exactly the position humans find themselves in — all the time, in every age of mankind. What we think of as wise or intelligent may not always be so, and this is especially true of intelligence. We are prepared to give wisdom a broader and more flexible mandate, but we tend to define intelligence more narrowly.

That's why I believe that being useful is better than being smart. The former informs the latter. A smart ass can save your life, but it is still a pain. That pain is ameliorated by the utility value.

So here I am, trying desperately to be more useful every day. It is the first of my year's new resolutions.

Talking of Hawking

Tonight, I am in a somewhat Shakespearean mood:

KING HENRY VI
Why, how now, uncle Gloucester!
GLOUCESTER
Talking of hawking; nothing else, my lord.

(From Henry VI Part II, Act 2 Scene 1, a rather apposite passage.)

The discussion on this page has been on my old neighbour's somewhat indiscreet (perhaps deliberately so?) comment on the necessity of God as far as the existence of this universe is concerned. The comments in particular are amusing grist for the student of epistemology. Some outright howlers have been perpetrated, along with ancient chestnuts so hoary as to be dangerous conkers.

Take for example the following supposedly logical argument for the danger of being a theist, presented by a commenter called 'Natman':

1. If you believe in a single God, you will have to choose one out of infinite possible varieties.
   
2. If any percent of the possible gods will punish you eternally, then there are an infinite number of hypothetical gods who, if they exist, would punish you for eternity.
   
3. If there is only one god, then your chance of worshipping it, and not a nonexistent entity instead, is one out of infinity.
   
4. Therefore you will almost surely fail to pick up the correct "One True God".
   
5. So if a god does exist, the chance of you going to any variety of heaven is infinitesimal, regardless of whether you are religious or not.
   

What do you think of this reasoning? Personally, I think that my argument for not being an atheist is better, and certainly more entertaining. In my next post, I will probably discuss why I find Natman's 'logic' so funny, and will link that to why 'integrated programmes' are also very amusing. Cheers!

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Update: I've put some responses to Natman's argument in the comments section. Those are better there than in a separate post of their own.

Fear of Aliens

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking recently expressed the idea that one ought to fear aliens. Here is the key passage in the Times article on his Discovery Channel show:

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is "a little too risky". He said: "If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans."

The fallacy in this otherwise brilliant man's idea is clear. "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop..." assumes that alien life is not alien. It is of course rational to base our concepts on how intelligent life MIGHT behave on the only clear example we have, the one on which we base all our concepts of intelligence — humanity. But to then say that aliens might develop like us ignores the very mathematical brain he cites earlier:

"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational," he said. "The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like."

The numbers alone should make thinking about aliens also factor in the likelihood that aliens are extremely unlikely to be anything like us. But there are also a few other statistics that should be of importance: for example, given that we have encountered no recognizable trace of alien life so far, inductive reasoning should hold that there is no such thing as alien life in a form that we can recognize as such.

It is similar to the statistical idea here: the longer we exist, the more we are certain that a) humans are the only humanly-defined human-level intelligence around, and b) life only exists on our planet. How can that be? Surely the laws of probability must dictate that there is other life elsewhere?

Actually, here we run aground on the rocks of infinity, so to speak. In theory, anything is possible in an infinite universe. However, if there are any universal laws at all, this constrains certain events from happening; and empirically speaking, the 'certitude' that anything is possible does not mean that any specific thing has indeed occurred. It is unthinkable to some scientists that alien life does not exist, but that is the triumph of imagination over intellect (Einstein's definition of love, actually).

Here's another point to ponder: in an infinite universe, there can be an infinite number of intelligent alien races — but in an infinite universe, the 'quarantine distance' between them might be too great to overcome. Perhaps they are all out there, but too far away, like individual colonies of sulfur-loving bacteria near ocean vents, that will never ever meet members of other colonies.

I don't fear aliens. But I love cats, and fear sharks. I am neutral towards dogs in general, and dislike many kinds of insects. The chances that these biases will affect my future transactions with (for now) imaginary aliens are statistically nil in an infinite universe. Think about what that might mean.