Meaning machines

People feel proud about their intelect. They believe it defines them, as it took humble monkeys from the savanna and made them top of the food chain. Yet the concept is quite nebulous. Other creatures have some intelligence and now, with the new machines, there is a lot of intelligence around, but it still feels off. So we're in a new culture shock: forced to define intelligence, accept it in others and other things, then realize that it was never about that in the first place. Think of a brain, any brain, even an ant brain. It has a simple purpose: to centralize inputs from sensory organs and decide what to do. It may be one brain, multiple nervous clusters, many different types of architecture. We should call it nervous system, but for the intent and purposes of this blog post we'll call the thing a brain. From the definition above we see that its main goal is a translation: from input data to meaningful action. Therein lies the intuition that leads us to the truth: the brain is not…