85515 - Transcription: Podcast With Us #127: Intelligence

N. Lygeros

This podcast is dedicated to intelligence. With that word we mean many things. And the problem is to have a consistent definition about this notion. It may be for some of us a judgment or maybe a good sense, a practical sense. In reality a kind of initiative  because we need that to understand the world. So we can also consider that it’s a global capacity for an individual to think rationally his relation with the world, his relation between humans, his relation with these non-human beings. For that we can see that intelligence looks also like a goal directed adaptive behavior. We mean by that that it’s not just a mentation, it’s also a behavior and this behavior has a goal. For that goal we use many things and of course many skills. So the idea is to use different skills, in fact totally different skills and to create a strategic mix to solve tough problems. In that sense we can see that intelligence is a kind of force. This force is in fact a way to maximize future, freedom of action. So it’s a way to avoid to be trapped. If we think like this we can see that intelligence uses the past to solve a problem of the present but it solves a problem of the present in a very specific way in fact to have more degrees of freedom in each action in the future. We can see that it’s a way to create many options to find the best one but at the end of the process to be the next step also in a situation with many options. So, not only one, not only one direction, many bifurcations in its universe and this freedom, this management of this freedom with a goal, with tasks and skills, it’s a kind a of manifold of thoughts. And its core is our intelligence.