Intelligent Systems Many Manners of Adapting to Environment

Abstract

What is intelligence is a debated and still open issue. Psychologists have identified many different skills involved in intelligence, but there is no agreement on a general definition. Without entering in the debate, we will here adopt a definition pertaining to philosophical area, general enough to include most meanings currently used in psychology and in common sense and specific enough to distinguish intelligence from other capacities. Intelligence is the ability to find adaptative responses to perturbations both of the internal and the external environment recovering proper equilibrium. Most systems, artificial and natural, are intelligent in the sense of the proposed definition, as most of them have the capacity to restore their systemic balance in response to change occurring in both inner and outer milieu. We shall then investigate by which means different systems adapt to their environment and if—and in what aspects—human intelligence differs from every other kind of intelligence known to us. To answer both questions, we will distinguish objective—or intrinsic, or tacit—intelligence from subjective—or explicit—intelligence, characterized by mental activity, language, and auto conscience. We will finally support the thesis that in human being intelligence emerges thanks to the interplay among three actors: objective intelligence, subjective intelligence, and their environment(s).