[lammaredder]

Further thoughts:-

I spend most of my time working on artificial intelligence through the top-down approach, so I've never really spent a lot of time thinking about what intelligence is in lower creatures like insects. Most creatures on the planet have very little in the way of intelligence, but they can find their way around and do lots of complex things by following simple rules which have been programmed into them as instincts. According to the definition I provided at the end of my previous post, intelligence wouldn't apply to them, but it's clear that some show more intelligent behaviours than others, and if they can be more intelligent then that implies that they are intelligent to some degree, thereby rendering my definition invalid. So, either I need to come up with a new definition or I have to make some kind of distinction between the two different kinds of intelligence involved.

Our kind of intelligence is the real deal - we can apply it to anything because we are general-purpose thinking machines. Many insects may be running entirely on instincts with very little requirement or capability to learn anything - they simply have evolved responses which have been selected for on the basis that they aid survival and reproduction, and by having more of these instincts they can display what appear to be more intelligent behaviours. They may not need any database of knowledge which is added to as they go along, and indeed they needn't have any understanding of the world at all - they can be successful just by responding in standard ways to standard triggers such as chemical trails which they may be programmed to follow. Everything they do is set in advance by tight rules which constrain their behaviour and they are only able to adapt to new circumstances through evolution where a viable route for transition is open to them. We are radically different, able to change almost everything about the way we live and behave within a single lifetime.

There is only one species on this planet which has a fully-capable general intelligence, though neanderthals may also have had that and perhaps died out through bad luck. There are a lot of species which are somewhere in between us and instinct-driven creatures. It's surprising that some of them are so capable (chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans) without quite having a full general intelligence - they seem so near to it and yet they've been around for millions of years without being able to make the final breakthrough. It would be good to know just what the barrier is that's in their way and how we got past it. Parrots and crows do just about as well despite having much smaller brains, so capacity doesn't appear to be the limit - it must be something functional, or several functional things.

Anyway, the point is that there are set programs in the form of instincts which control behaviour that generate behaviours which might be seen as intelligent, but maybe they aren't really intelligent. If you thrust your fingers towards my eyes, I will blink, but that isn't intelligence - it's programmed, instinctive behaviour which serves the same kind of purpose as intelligence, but it simply evolved through being successful and there is no genuine intelligence tied up in it. So, I think I'm going to stick with my original definition for the moment and declare that there's a clear divide between real intelligence and evolved intelligent behaviours. Real intelligence may of course be creeping into insects to some degree, allowing them to learn a limited amount of things about the world and to use that learning to better guide the application of their instinctive behaviours, but almost everything else they do is based on instinctive responses.