[quote=3rdvogon;1216132]Of course intelligence is a difficult thing to pin a single one sentence definition on but we can identify a number of characteristics that seem to have been necessary for it to develop on earth and many of these will be needed by any life form that is to be regarded at intelligent. Especially if it is ever to develop two critical by-products that human intelligence has spawned Technology & Culture.
The examples of marine life offered earlier were explained that adapting colour and shape to the local environment was primarily a matter of pure processing power. Assuming the animal has the appropriate body features that allow it to change it's physical appearance rapidly then the control mechanism simply needs to read inputs from the surrounding environment telling it what that looks like and then send instructions to all the necessary organs to bring about the shape and colour shift. In programming terms this is not actually such a complex process, It can be almost a reflex and could even be performed by distributed processors. For example an animal could have a hundred processing nodes each connected to 100 sections of its body and each node connected to its own light sense organ (eye). Each of the 100 (eyes) passes information to its parent node about what the environmental colours and textures are and the node sends standard sets of signals to the cells it controls to change to match that. Once such a mechanism evolves it can be passed down genetically hard wired with little need to change over many generations.
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However for an animal to look up at the night sky and observe the movement of the points of light it sees, then for it to go further and observe that over time they do not all move in the same way - that some appear to change direction and that these motions also correspond to patterns across the cycle of the seasons is a very different matter. For a creature to do that it must have a powerful memory. It must have a sense of time and be able to think about where things were in the past and where they will be in the future. Humans had achieved all of that long before they even learned how to make metal tools. If you want to look for intelligence then it seems that you cannot escape from the need to have a powerful memory. Memory allows thoughts to be retained over time - it allows the animal to have a sense of its own existence through time and memory allows a method of communication which will allow ideas in one animal to be passed on to others down through the generations. I would suggest that without that kind of massive storage and retrieval capacity, combined with an ability to run comparisons between sets of stored information no animal will have intelligence and certainly not problem solving intelligence.
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agreed
intelligence , memory or memory , intelligence go hand in hand