Continuing this reductio ad abusrdum, you might reach the fallactious conclusion, as some famous cranks in the past did, that intelligence is even found in plants, animals, women, and even the uncivilized savages of the new continent.
Intelligence appears in gradients, not a simple binary.
> Intelligence appears in gradients, not a simple binary.
Sure, I'm in no way countering such a notion and your snarky comment is a gross mischaracterization of my comment. So far off I have a difficult time believing it isn't intentional.
The "surprise" is not that plants, animals, or even women turn out to be intelligent under the definition of "collection of experiences" but that rocks have intelligence, atom, photons, and even more confusingly groups of photons, the set of all doors, the set of all doors that such that only one door per city exists in the same set. Or any number of meta collections. This is the controversial part, not women being intelligent. Plants are still up for debate, but I'm very open to a broad definition of intelligence.
But the issue is that I, and the general fields of cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, and essentially everyone except for a subset of computer scientists, agree that intelligence is more than a collection of experiences (including if that collection has memory). In other words, it is more than a Turing Machine. What that more is, is debated but it is still generally agreed upon that intelligence requires abstraction, planning, online learning, and creativity. But all these themselves have complicated nuanced definitions that are much more than what the average person thinks they mean. But that's a classic issue where academics use the same words normal people do but have far more restrictions on their meaning. Which often confuses the average person when they are unwilling to accept this fact that words can have different meanings under different contexts (despite that we all do this quite frequently and such a concept exists in both our comments).
You seem to use the word intelligence to mean `consciousness` (if you replaced the first with the latter I would agree with your argument).
I would define "intelligence" as (1) the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations and (2) the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment.
It turns out that this is also the Merriam-Webster definition [0].
By that definition, yes AlphaZero was learning and understanding how to deal with situations and is intelligent, and yes most machine-learning systems and many other systems that have a specific goal and manipulate data/the environment to optimize for that goal, are intelligent.
By this definition, a non-living, non-conscious entity can be intelligent.
And intelligence has nothing to do with "experiences" (which seem to belong in the "consciousness" debate).
Intelligence appears in gradients, not a simple binary.