On the description of intelligent systems
The paper discusses the followwing main points. A behavior is qualified as being intelligent as a consequence of a mental categorization. Therefore we have to decide which conditions must be satisfied in order to categorize a behavior as being intelligent. These conditions are usually different in different historical periods. The systems to which we attribute intelligent behavior can be considered as physical systems too. We can thus use the approach of physics or the approach of psychology to describe their behavior. The two descriptions are irreducible as long as the psychological approach admits that the system (the subject in this context) is the cause of its activities and of its changes, where the physical approach assumes that every change of a physical thing is caused by a different physical thing. We can only propose a correspondence between the two descriptions of the same facts, which must be characterized in a way that is compatible with both approaches. We think of mental activity as potentially having no limits. Nevertheless, we consider as being pathological behaviors where the mental activity is too disconnected, or too stereotyped. Thus we assume that a normal behavior is constrained by the use of paradigms. The paradigms can also be viewed as correlations among the occurrences of the mental activities involved, and so they allow predictions about the occurrence of a mental activity. The paradigms usually concern the constitutive mental activity of things, the relations that we expect to hold among the things, and the consequences we expect to follow from certain facts.