[Inquiry] Re: Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems

[Jon Awbrey]

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PRO.  Note 6

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1.1.2.  Intelligence, Knowledge, Execution

Intelligence, for my purposes, is characterized as a technical ability
of choice in a situation as represented.  It is the ability to pick out
a line on a map, to find a series of middle terms that make connections
between represented positions.  In the type of situation that typically
calls it out, intelligence is faced with two representations of position.
This pair of pointers to points on a map are typically interpreted as
indices of current and desired positions.  The two images are symbols
or analogues of the actual site and the intended goal of the system.
They themselves exist in a space that shadows the dynamic reality of
the agent involved.  But the dynamic reality of the intelligent agent
forms a manifold of states that subsists beneath its experience and
becomes manifest only gradually and partially in the observations of
that agent.  It is among the states of this basic manifold that all
of the real sites and all of the real goals of the agent are located.

The notion of intelligence laid out here has been abstracted from
two capacities that it both requires and supports -- we may call
this couple of conjoined capacities "knowledge" and "execution".

1.  Knowledge is the fund of available representations, the glove-box full of maps.

2.  Execution is the array of possible actions and the power of performing them,
    the executive ability that directs motor responses in accord with the line
    that is picked out on the map.

If we were to pursue the metaphor just far enough to bring out
a constrast between these two components of intelligent conduct,
we could say that execution is associated with the driving-gloves,
that must be sorted out from the jumble of maps in the glove-box and
used to get a grip on the mechanisms of performance and control that
alone can actualize an agent's choices with regard to driving a system.

Jon Awbrey

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