Darwin’s interest 140 years ago was in comparing human minds to animal minds from the point of view of evolution. I devoted my last post to a brief treatment of his findings. My interest today is in comparing the dimensions of my personal experience of my own mind with the notion of artificial intelligence.
The basic assumption is that artificial intelligence is in some way based on the genuine article, human intelligence, of which any given mind is but one unique example. What is the connection between the two?
Introspection has a bad name because scientists keep imposing their so-called objective standards on its fundamentally subjective nature, so any qualities of individual intelligence keep getting thrown out with the bath water. Accepting the intimate, subjective nature of personal experience, I offer my findings concerning the facets of intelligence I discover in myself, not because I am egotistical, but because my findings are based on a thirty-years study of the one mind I have immediate access to, which happens to be my own.
What I find is a mind divided into three parts: perception, judgment, and action. The first part answers the question, “What’s happening?” The second, “What does that mean?” or “So what?” The third, “What should I do?” The three parts taken in serial fashion lead to my engagement with the external world, which I divide onto four levels of nature, culture, community, and family.
My proposal is that my intelligence is spread between all four parts of the continuous and ever-changing loop of engagement between my inner and outer worlds. Perception contributes its share, judgment its, my behavior its, and the world I live in contributes its share on the levels of nature, culture, community, and the family I live in.
My mind absolutely depends on there being an outside world to connect with and seek guidance from. The natural and humanized world I am born to contains a good share of my personal understanding and intelligence. It is up to the inner parts of my mind to figure out how to engage the external parts so that I fit in as an integral part of our common planet’s share of universal intelligence.
In this post I can’t fit in much more than a partial listing of some of the dimensions I discover from studying my own experience in perceiving, judging, acting on, and engaging with the inner and outer worlds I have been given for exactly one lifetime.
I start with the dimensions of my personal perception, which include: arousal, excitement, expectancy, curiosity, my personal perspective at the time, my outlook, the sensory qualities I discover, the level of detail I observe, and the concentration and attention with which I reach out as the price I pay to observe anything at all.
The result of that effort leads to a sensory impression made up of contributions from my various senses, the clarity with which I regard that impression, the aesthetic framework within which I receive it as an integral image composed of many complex relationships, together with the awe and wonder that well up within me. Leading to a recognition of what it is I am witnessing, an interpretation of its nature, and a linking of that interpretation to conceptions I have derived from previous rounds of perception.
Then my faculty of judgment takes over from perception and tries to figure out the significance and meaning of that phase of my engagement. Immediately I am confronted by the situation I am in as modified by my current perception. That situation takes shape as its various dimensions become established by my streaming experience and engagement. I understand what’s going on to some degree, derive meaning from that understanding, partly by intuition, partly by direct perception of the latest bulletin from the exterior.
I compare that meaningful understanding to what it was a few moments ago, developing a sense of how things are developing in comparison to what they were when I was last moved to act, that comparison giving rise to a delta signal that spurs my current state of conscious awareness. I am immediately aware of the polarity of what’s happening from my point of view—whether it makes a good or bad fit to my expectations.
That disparity stirs up a new round of thought, which I measure against my biological (survival) values, taking into account the emotions I find welling up as a result of my expanding experience. My intuition and imagination come into play, stirring my judgment to review my priorities in this particular situation and come to a decision of how best to direct my life force into an appropriate course of action.
If I recognize the drift of the situation as being one I am familiar with, I resort to a reflex or habitual action, mimicry of actions I have seen others perform, familiar routines dictated by prejudice (prejudgment) or ideology. I set a goal and begin to plan my physical response through a particular project, sequence of steps involving relationships I can count on with others, or call on familiar skills, gestures, postures, and other behaviors that might help me reach the goals I have set for myself on this particular occasion.
With the result that perception and judgment have led me to act in the world on a level appropriate to the situation I believe myself to be in.
In my next post I will deal with the possible dimensions of what happens on the level of nature, culture, community, and family as a result of the action I have taken in the context of my grasp of the situation I am trying to develop or modify through exercise of my situated intelligence.
Again, what I am trying to do is explore the complexity of the everyday workings of our minds that we collectively gloss by the word “intelligence,” with an eye to our hopes and fantasies for the achievements of machine or “artificial” intelligence which is rapidly trying to substitute for the native version I am here roughing-out in these posts.
