5 in 5 (4)

5 in 5 – 4

The Intelligence of Rocks

The phrase ‘dumb as a rock’ is quite an interesting phrase. It means being terminally stupid, unintelligent, and perhaps it might just have started off as referring to someone who is unable to speak. In the context of exploring machine intelligence, it’s only apt that all kinds of intelligence be studied. Intelligence is defined as ‘the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills’, and it’s fair to say that a rock certainly does not fulfill this definition, at least not in the paradigm we believe in.

If for a moment, you step away from our current human-centered understanding of intelligence, you might just see the world in a new light. Of course, we do acknowledge the intelligence of entities such as animals, trees, and micro-organisms, but we do so from a human intelligence perspective. Squirrels are strategic because they create pretend to hide nuts in fake holes to fool rivals. Sheep are social animals as they move in flocks. These are aspects of intelligence we understand and relate to. But what about the parts on the intelligence spectrum that we don’t understand? A rock, or any other unintelligeble entity could fall on that scale.

What if a rock operates on a plane we simple cannot see? They’ve been around since the beginning of time, and have seen the best and the worst of this planet, and other planets in the universe. There are many different types of rocks, formed through different processes-does that mean they have different intelligences? Is a sedimentary rock more intelligent than a grain of sand? Or do they have different kinds of intelligences? Perhaps a rock formed over millions of years, with layers of lava cooling over different periods of time gives it a different kind of intelligence, one connected with experience and age. Rocks are often composed of elements that are completely different from the ones that form our makeup. Rather interestingly, rocks contain silicon, an element that is the backbone of our computing, and by extension, the building blocks of machine intelligence.

Perhaps the intelligence of a rock is the reason for it’s existence. If natural selection is anything to go by, rocks have existed far before us, and will continue to exist until the heat death of the universe. The intent of this line of thought isn’t to prove that rocks are intelligent entities, but to draw attention to other non-human kinds of intelligence. Parameters and metrics which we don’t usually tend to think of as intellligent doesn’t necessarily mean that it does not have any intelligence at all. Perhaps being as ‘dumb as a rock’ is actually good thing, we may never truly be as intelligent as a rock.