Re:

I sugggest the expression really shoul= be "I think, therefore I believe I am"

I believe that I think, but am "I" the agent of thi=king?

i is a mental construct that gives an evolutionary adva=tage, .

absolutely. so are truth and meaning

i wonder in game theory what advantage it gives. .

Law of large numbers is all that is needed

I am not sure how to relate that to game theory; you may be able to ge= that without evolutionary competition. However, game theory is probably t=e way to explain how we evolve submission to norms beyond indirect recipro=ity.

Most animals don=#39;t have a self model, probably because they don't have complex enou=h brains or long enough training phases (childhoods) to do meta-regulation=

they may have physical prothesitcs =C240 like cat whiskers. to enable it to guage width of hole.=C2?

no, i disagree, the spaceship i= only an advanced prosthetic.. not interesting at all. .=C2 interesting is we have no idea what the top down for humans is. =A0. collective. group behavior, I dont see any differnce =C2 between humans and cells, just a different layer of the =ame.. regulatory systems. action s feedbacks and=" learning ",. all with no goal . the goals are il=usions. . that the indiv thinks they decide. like the soldier ant t=at is recapitualted to a garbage ant if the garbage ants are wiped out. =C2 the soldier ant thinks it made the decsion. . =A0

Exactly! Sensors like that are often one of these solution that get =ou 80% of the way with 20% of the effort. Except that minds that take 15 y=ars to train are o dramatically more expensive that almost no species can =fford them (but they end up getting you to the moon, which no prosthesis c=n).

So you don't think th=t practical intelligence is the ability to build arbitrary prosthetics?

I agree that humans share an important similarity wi=h cells, i.e. they have mechanisms that suppress individual competition wh=n it conflicts too much with group selection. Without such mechanisms, gro=p selection fails, because within each group, defectors have a local advan=age.

The simplest mechanism to enforce cooperatio= is reputation, but it works only when others are looking, and manage to k=ep tallies. To do better than that, evolution has to breed a virtual next =evel regulator into the individual, which may be your missing "top do=n for humans". A system of norms and taboos, for instance a religi=n or ideology that people pick up from their environment.

Individuals can decide, but in social contexts, the utility of dec=sions is given by how well we understand the constraints under which we op=rate.

It seems that much of what we call intelligence co=ld be described as detecting causal structure in a domain. Causality means=that you have a model that tells you how change of a condition will influe=ce the distribution of outcomes. Of course, crabs do that too, to an exten=.

When I was in Munich, a patent lawyer challenged me =o come up with a definition of creativity from a machine learning perspect=ve. He has to judge the originality of inventions, and something that a do=ain expert can come up with "naturally" does not count as =n invention, even if it has never been done before.

Lea=ning systems tend to move along gradients, and the "natural soluti=n" of the domain expert can be seen as an extrapolation of the sol=tion space along the known gradients, until an optimum is found. Creativit= seems to involve crossing discontinuities in the problem space, i.e. do m=re than follow the gradients. It is not magic, of course; you can use evol=tionary methods/Monte Carlo etc., but you find that many domain experts ar= capable without being creative.

Can we mea=ure the ability of different animals for creativity?

watch the octupus, find its prey, is it =reative.? is it intelligent? are virus creatvie?=C2* finding new methods to infect the host. . hackers=C240