Intelligence
Intelligence
Image from Steve Bowers

The ability to solve problems; pattern recognition, using limited resources to achieve a set of goals. Intelligence may be biological or ai, rl or vir, familiar or completely alien or unexpected. The products of intelligence may be ingenious, insightful, or elegant. Intelligence does not indicate sentience; not all sentient beings are intelligent. However, all sophont beings are.
 
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    The foundation from which AI developed, from Information Age Old Earth. Still a knowledge field in its own right. Artificial Intelligence involves programming computers, non-sentient virtuals, nano, and bots to emulate sophont cognitive abilities, and eventually to acquire sentience in their own right. It involves a large number of interrelated fields, including fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, neural networks, pattern recognition algorithms, natural language processing, and speech, comlink, or affinitylink recognition. Today many software packages are widely available that can automatically enable most non-sentient computational devices to be provolved to sentience.
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    The part of the psyche of any being that experiences awareness and consciousness. In evolved bionts there is a large demarcation between conscious and unconscious; in augmented cyborgs, vecs, and ai or even in neogens the distinction is less clear.
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    Sentience is awareness, including the ability to experience pleasure or pain (or analogous drives and experiences) and make predictions about the future. A sentient being is sapient to at least some degree, and sentience is in turn a prerequisite for sophonce. Terragen animals are sentient, as are analogous non-terragen bionts, neogens, and various m-life and a-life entities. On the other hand plants and single-celled organisms (and their nonbiological or xenobiont equivalents) are considered non-sentient or minimally sentient. Modern toposophology has long had a variety of technical definitions for the kinds and degrees of sentience, together with associated tests. Some of these date as far back as the primitive investigations of the 1st century BT or before; these in turn owe something to philosophical speculations from the dawn of the Agricultural Age.
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  • Sentience, Sapience, Sophonce
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    As an adjective, having the characteristics of sentience. As a noun, particularly as a collective noun, any being that is deemed to have sentience, as in "The Universal Bill of Sentient Rights".
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    A person. A being that has the quality of sophonce. Such beings are sometimes called 'sapients'. For historical reasons, sophont-grade ais, may be called 'turingrade ais', even though because of philosophical and practical difficulties with the Turing Test the term 'sophont ai' would be clearer.
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    Colloquial term used to describe sophont to transapient level software based lifeforms whether of virtual, ai, or upload origin. Sophtware entities are usually characterized as not being limited to a single dedicated processor to support their minds but instead operating as mobile blocks of self-referential code able to transfer themselves over information networks and among any group of processing substrates designed to accommodate them.
 
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Development Notes
Text by M. Alan Kazlev

Initially published on 10 November 2001.