Intelligent agent

“ For it would be demonstrated that an apparatus thoroughly well adapted to a particular purpose might be the result of a method of trial and error worked by unintelligent agents, as well as of the direct application of the means appropriate to that end, by an intelligent agent. ”

“ In the first place, it is incredible to suppose that man, as an intelligent, rational, free agent, capable of character, should have no provision in his mental make-up, no faculty of knowledge, furnishing a principle of guidance for meeting the responsibilities of life. ”

“ The agent intelligence or 'aql fa''al is the external power, the emanation from God which is able to awaken the latent power in man and arouse it to activity, and the acquired intelligence or 'aql mustafad is the intelligence aroused to activity and developed under the inspiration of the agent intelligence. Thus the intelligence in action is related to the potential intellect as form is to matter, but the agent intelligence enters from outside, and by its operation the intelligence receives new powers, so that its highest activity is "acquired." ”

“ The sublimest works of intelligence, then, are quite possible; and may be easily conceived to be executed without any consciousness of them on the part of the apparent and immediate agent. Suppose man to be actuated throughout his whole nature by the might of some foreign agency ”

“ Just as a commercial firm sends out a representative for the collection of data concerning certain phases of its business or it may be of any business or the entire world market so the Thinker projects his own consciousness into the mechanisms which are in their totality the egoic life. That is, he sends out his agent, the ego, into life and into the objective world of facts and demands that he shall convey to him, from all points of the territory which he is expected to cover, reports of his findings. ”

“ This is the theory of the importance of the individual, raised, so to speak, to its very highest potence. We not only attribute the most important and far-reaching of all changes to a single agent, but declare that that agent cannot have been human, and indeed cannot have been less than the first cause of all changes. ”

“ Probably no single test could do justice to so complex a trait as intelligence. Two important features of intelligent action are quickness in seizing the key to a novel situation, and firmness in limiting activity to the right direction, and suppressing acts which are obviously useless for the purpose in hand. ”

“ These questions center attention upon the significance of reflective intelligence in the process of experience. The extent of an agent's capacity for inference, its power to use a given fact as a sign of something not yet given, measures the extent of its ability systematically to enlarge its control of the future.
A being which can use given and finished facts as signs of things to come; which can take given things as evidences of absent things, can, in that degree, forecast the future; it can form reasonable expectations. It is capable of achieving ideas; it is possessed of intelligence. ”

“ Now, when we remember that the method of intelligence is to profit by chance experience, while the method of reason is, with foresight and intention, to adapt means to ends, we shall see that to move a straw even a quarter of an inch, or to make a bridge with particles of mould, would require rational and not merely intelligent powers. Chance experience would not supply the necessary data to be utilized by intelligence when repetition had established an association in the conscious situation. ”

“ In the more formal experiments the person who is willed is known as the sensitive, subject, or percipient; the person who conducts the experiment is known as the agent or operator. The sensitive is presumed to receive, in some unusual manner, from the minds of the agent and the company, an impression regarding the action to be performed, without communication between them in any ordinary manner. ”

“ While this sense plays its part as one of the protective agencies, it is still more useful as an agent in the acquisition of knowledge in general, and has much to do with the development of the intellectual faculties. We may look, therefore, upon the increasing dominance of the sense of sight as a leading agency in the making of man as a thinking being, and may ascribe to this in a considerable measure the thirst for information and faculty of imitation so marked in the apes. ”

“ It will be seen, then, how marvellously the action of certain senses may be exalted by long and careful training on the one hand, and suddenly by disease on the other. We have seen, moreover, how some persons known as sensitives are able to receive impressions by thought-transference so as to name cards, repeat words and fictitious names, both of persons and places, merely thought of but not spoken by another person known as the agent or operator, and to draw diagrams unmistakably like those formed in the mind or intently looked upon by the agent. ”

“ There is no field of human activity, responsibility, or reason, in which rational beings object to an agent because he has been weighed in the balance and not found wanting; no department of human reason in which sane men reject an agent because he has had experience, making him exceptionally competent and fit. ”

“ This passage seems to be the complement of what had just been asserted, that the agent is ever more influential than the subject, and the originating cause than the matter; for the intellect, in activity, may be said to create, to identify with itself that is, the knowledge which it acquires concerning external things through abstract reasoning. ”

“ Now, B is a very different man; he is slow, but he reasons everything out. A knows the right thing to do; and B can tell you why it must be done. A has the keenest intelligence, but B the clearest reasoning faculty. If I have occasion to question them about any mechanical contrivance, A says, 'Let me see it work;' but B says, 'Let me think it out.'"
In other words, A, the intelligent man, deals with phenomena as wholes, and his perceptual inferences are rapid and exact; while B, the reasoner, analyzes the phenomena, and draws conceptual inferences about them. ”

“ For this purpose, by means of our press, we increase their blind faith in these laws. Intelligent Goys will boast of their knowledge, and verifying it logically they will put into practice all scientific information compiled by our agents for the purpose of educating their minds in the direction which we require. ”

“ Granting, then, that behaviour is shown to be intelligent by the fact that there is evidence of profiting by experience, we may say that the level attained by the intelligence is indicated by the complexity of the adjustment, its precision, the individuality shown, the amount of prevision disclosed, and in its being such as to extract from the circumstances the maximum of benefit. ”

“ But with intelligence departs the willingness even to be intelligently served, and just as religion falls back upon threats of hell, so at last science calls in the police. If my house is ventilated and sanitary, it is not because science has made me intelligent, but because the expert to whom I have delegated my intelligence is now applying it on my behalf, with or without my consent. ”

“ Why, in one instance, do you assign away the reason from the immediate agent, the animal, and fix it upon the creator, and why in another instance do you confine and attribute it to the immediate agent, the man? Why should the engineer have the absolute credit of his work? and why should not the beaver and the bee? Do you answer that man exhibits reason in a higher, and animals in a lower degree; and that therefore his reason is really his own? ”

“ Generally speaking, the onlooker, with his wider field of vision, regards the ultimate outcome of an activity as what it is more really doing; and the most previous agent ascertainable, being the first source of action, he regards as the most real agent in the field. ”

“ The illustrations have thus far been purposely confined to the more elementary types of work, so that a very strong doubt must still remain as to whether this kind of cooperation is desirable in the case of more intelligent mechanics, that is, in the case of men who are more capable of generalization, and who would therefore be more likely, of their own volition, to choose the more scientific and better methods. ”

“ So likewise early myth and legend have had to take recourse to the intervention of personal, or at least animate agents, to make headway in the domain of brute matter, which83 figures commonly as means in the hands of manlike agents of some sort, rather than as a self-directing agent with initiative and a natural bent of its own. ”

“ No limited stock-in-trade of knowledge, such as suffices for a joiner or an ostler, will serve. They must keep on mastering new points, new aspects, they must be intelligent and adaptable, they must get a grasp of that permanent something that lies behind the changing immediate practice. ”

“ It should be observed by all, that whatever he undertakes is quickly executed. He should quietly penetrate other men's thoughts and intentions; his inquiries should be discreet, intelligent, and active. ”

“ Do we not all of us know hundreds of practical men who are in the highest degree intelligent, but in whom the rational, analytic faculty is but little developed? Is it any injustice to the brutes to contend that their inferences are of the same order as those of these excellent practical folk? ”

“ They are occurring every day in every line of business and industry, as well as in politics and government. We are told by some who have made a study of this subject that the only way to find out what a man can do, what his aptitudes are, what are his abilities, his capacities, his type, and what his performances will be, is to put him in a place where he will have an opportunity to show what there is in him. If this is the best that science can do for us, we are, then, groping in darkness through a tangled maze of pitfalls. ”

“ The second important characteristic of intelligence is that it considers either other means of reaching a given end, or other ends, and by working out the consequences of these also has the basis for deliberation and choice. The method of "multiple working hypotheses," urged as highly important in scientific investigation, is no less essential in the moral field. To bring several ends into the field of consideration is the characteristic of the intelligent, or as we often say, the open-minded man. ”

“ That being so, he that, owing to an unrefined understanding, beholdeth his own self as solely the agent, he, dull in mind, beholdeth not. He that hath no feeling of egoism, whose mind is not sullied, he, even killing all these people, killeth not, nor is fettered (by action) .300—Knowledge, the object of knowledge, and the knower, form the three-fold impulse of action. Instrument, action, and the agent, form the three-fold complement of action.301 Knowledge, action, and agent, are declared in the enumeration of qualities to be three-fold, according to the difference of qualities. ”

“ Human ingenuity, business perception and organizing power have shown once more their startling possibilities when directed and controlled by cool, clear-eyed intelligence combined with general mental capacity. ”

“ Our practical and technical habits, where the agent is other than his materials and aims, lead us to draw the same distinctions in the realm of total Nature: they are aspects useful in ordine ad hominem which we, without due modification, apply in ordine ad Universum. ”

“ There is a natural desire on the part of every intelligent human being to harmonize his information—to make his theories agree—in other words, to make what he knows, or thinks he knows, in one department, agree and harmonize with what he knows, or thinks he knows, in every other department of human knowledge. ”

“ But I must now note the service which suits them, the domain in which they apply and are valid, and what they teach us thereby about the meaning, reach, and natural task of intelligence.
Whilst instinct vibrates in sympathetic harmony with life, it is about inert matter that intelligence is granted; it is a rider to our faculty of action; it triumphs in geometry; it feels at home among the objects in which our industry finds its supports and its tools. In a word, "our logic is primarily the logic of solids." (Preface to "Creative Evolution".) ”

“ We must therefore make the distinction and say, that whilst no primary agent or prime efficient produces effects beyond its powers, every instrumental agent may exceed its own proper powers in action; for it acts not merely by its own virtue but by the virtue of a superior efficient.... ”

“ For persons in our profession whose concerns revolve around strategic issues, tactical questions and matters of managerial form and system, access to a new world of intuitive perception and self reflection would seem to offer, in the long term, the means by which to know in a truly objective way. ”

“ We may think that department Three of the mind, with its doings of right and its doings of wrong, must be there only to serve department Two; and we may suspect that the sphere of our activity exists for no other purpose than to illumine our cognitive consciousness by the experience of its results. Are not all sense and all emotion at bottom but turbid and perplexed modes of what in its clarified shape is intelligent cognition? Is not all experience just the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and nothing more? ”

“ Each great scientific discovery is in its turn reduced to a part of the common stock. It leaves the technical field, and spreads into the common life of men, becoming embodied in their daily beliefs,—a seed of thought, from which, by the agency of intelligent experience, new increments of science will one day spring. ”

“ How someday we might even get so smart we'll contact other intelligent races on other worlds. Yeah, we're smart. You know those star radiations?"
"That's not my specialty, you know," the Chief answered cautiously. ”