Comment by gobdovan
16 hours ago
Technically, that's a skill test, not an intelligence test. Intelligence measures rate of learning (kinda), so a good test would be something like: a Xonet is a poem of this form I just invented (Iambic rhythm, 15-9-6-15 verses), Xenglish is this language with these words, build a xonet that's grammatically correct in Xenglish and respects the structure in under 1 hour, in as few tries as possible, with an oracle that judges Xbeauty, which you'd also have to appease.
Even that is still fundamentally concerned with an an ability.
Every simple externally observable action or reaction can be replicated by something purely mechanistic.
We can't help but assign our own explaination for everything we see. We see something seek food or avoid damage, and we do those same things, and when we do it we are aware of it and feeling something about it.
But tropism is a very simple system that can have the same outward effect with nothing self aware or feeling behind it.
And on the flip side, a human can perform simple mechanical acts like turning a crank that a motor could do. Turning a crank doesn't prove that a person is merely a machine, nor that a motor wonders about the inner life of other motors.
Whatever the ways are to tease out the difference between a person and an animal or machine, it can't be anything as simple as something it can do better than say a dog. It has to be about what it chooses to do.