What is Intelligence? The Looming Philosophical Question behind Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The Looming Problem Behind Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Science is buried deep in how Occidental or Western Civilization has chosen to define its pe­culiar ideas of Truth (Epistemology) & Ontology (Metaphysics of us / universe). This paper identify how this Scientific Materialism and its physics paradigm has become inadequate and destructive to support living systems. AI is based on the ideas of first-order cybernetics, sufficient in creating “smart thinking appli­ances”. Second- and third-order cybernetics, requiring intelligence beyond a given context or mission driven task, has given corporate and military users overpower­ing asymmetric power over Natural & Collective Systems. Philosophy can regain its position as Queen of the Sciences if Cybernetic thinking and philosophical in­quiry expands concepts and methods advancing “intelligence” beyond command-and-control consciousness and the limits of Natural Science. A Natural Philo­sophy about the organization of whole systems would expand the tool chest of thinking beyond its analytic, reductive methodology. Moving from the domain of “Things” to whole, living Cybernetically formed systems crosses the boundary of complexity. This complexity of interlocking relationships, identity, and ways of processing information, not present in today’s guiding Information Technology theory and practice, calls into question the paradigm of Natural Science and its developmental “womb” for artificial intelligence.