17 - A preliminary version of a definition of intelligence

N. Lygeros
Translated from Greek by Athina Kehagias

What could someone think about the following definition?
A being is considered intelligent if it’s capable of producing intelligence.
If we were to now superficially examine it, this aphorism seems like a tautology.
Eliminating however this last hypothesis, we observe that we immediately produce a recursive process, because the intelligence which is produced by the being which we’ve considered intelligent, ought to itself create intelligence in order for it to be in turn considered intelligent.
Consequently, with our intelligence definition we obtain an “ingenious” chain, which is no longer an individual one!
The advantage of this definition is that it doesn’t presuppose a pre-existing intelligence to the one we are considering • it emerges therefore that intelligence can occur in a spontaneous manner.
In a different case it would seem to obtain a serious disadvantage, as the chain ought to be infinite • in actual fact, this is nothing • the only fact necessitated by that definition is that intelligence necessarily evolves on loops. (In other words, borrowing from the graph theory: the chain can’t be a tree).
This necessity could propose the spontaneous creation from the quantum vacuum, of a particle-antiparticle pair.
We temporarily conclude this preliminary draft with an example, so that all these wouldn’t appear as merely an amalgam of words void of any meaning, to our readers.
For that purpose it’s sufficient to imagine an “expert” from the science sector, and a “expert” from the humanities field who would’ve shared their views and their corresponding deductive reasoning upon a fundamental problem, and who would’ve eventually solved it, whereas each of them individually would’ve been incompetent to do so.
And of course it’s the inclusion of this new result which considers them intelligent, they would’ve therefore been competent to simultaneously produce intelligence, and they would’ve ascertained as a consequence our own obviously weird definition!