[MD] expanded list Platt

[Arlo Bensinger]

[John]
Yes you would.  I wouldn't.  I'd say the difference is that the fruit 
fly is alive and the pebble is not.

[Arlo]
Well, we're arguing semantics here. I'd simply say "alive" means 
"biological", and hence that is exactly what I said ("I'd say the 
difference you are seeing is the expanded repertoire of 
response-possibilities the fruit fly has [via its biological foundation]").

[John]
That's because I'm un-sophist-icated.

[Arlo]
No, you're not. You just like to pretend you are. :-)

[John]
Well quoting Platt might not win too many points with you Arlo, but 
he's quoting pirsig in a post here:

[Arlo]
I don't discount anything Platt says just because he says it. In this 
case, however Horse already pointed out that this is not a Pirsig 
quote. But introducing the term "thinking", like "intelligence", is 
something we need to approach cautiously.

Does a cell "think"? Does Quality "think"? Do Ribosomes "think"?

If by "thinking" you mean as I've already said "the ability to 
encode, manipulate and communicate abstract symbols representing 
experience" then I'd say this has a foundation in the complex neural 
structures of certain biological patterns, but it wouild not apply to 
amoebas, cells, ribosomes or protons.

That is, "thinking" is a very specific way certain complex species 
have to respond to their environment. I'd further argue that this is 
enabled by the sociality of the species. Animals, for example, that 
evidence greater social participation also evident greater 
"thinking". Dogs, dolphins, apes, etc. all appear to "think" more 
robustly than fruit flies. This is an interesting tangent, which 
would take us into "bee-think" (since bee populations have been 
mentioned here).

And if you're suggesting that "Quality thinks", then you've just made 
Quality directly into Platt's Qualigod.

[John]
We see other animals like your dog, and Bo's raven doing it.  Where 
does it stop? That's an open-ended question, in my book.

[Arlo]
Well that's my point. "Thinking" is not a synonym for "biological", 
it is a specific response afforded to species with the greater neural 
capacity to enable social participation.

[John]
But it's a valuable distinction to assert that only biological beings 
possess intelligence, not their individual constiuent parts.

[Arlo]
Aren't cells a constituent part of human beings? Of course, you 
*could* just simplify this to say "only sufficiently complex 
biological beings possess intelligence", and be done with it. :-)

[John]
If we're going to "go there", then I'd say we have to attribute the 
intelligence of particles to a cosmic background intelligent matrix 
of being.  This isn't a far-fetched way of looking at it from the 
perspective of eastern ways of liberation or QM, but this is also an 
area I assign to that which I deem investigation rather than definition.

[Arlo]
Well, saying "everything is intelligent against an intelligent 
matrix" just makes the distinction of intelligence meaningless. At 
the point where everything is intelligent what does it even mean? Its 
like saying "everything is purple". If that's so, then "purple" is a 
distinction without a difference.

Of course, you could introduce some sort of scale, which I had 
already done in discussing the evolutionary trajectory of 
response-repertoires. Cells are "more intelligent" than protons, and 
humans are "more intelligent" than cells, etc. But since 
"intelligence" has already been reduced to "response", what's the 
point of the term?