There is no way to measure awareness. We can only know we are aware ourselves. For all we know trees or rocks might have awareness. Or I could be the only being aware of itself in the universe. We have no way to prove anything about it. Therefore it is not a useful descriptor of intelligence (be it human, animal or artificial).
Agreed. Everything that looks like intelligence to ME is intelligent.
My measurement of outside intelligence is limited by my intelligence. So I can understand when something is stupider compared to me. For example, industrial machine vs human worker, human worker is infinitely more intelligent compared to machine, because this human worker can do all kinds of interesting stuff. this metaphorical "human worker" did everything around from laying a brick to launching a man to the Moon.
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Imagine Super-future, where humanity created nanobots and they ate everything around. And now instead of Earth there is just a cloud of them.
These nanonobots were clever and could adapt, and they had all the knowledge that humans had and even more(as they were eating earth a swarm was running global science experiments to understand as much as possible before the energy ends).
Once they ate the last bite of our Earth(an important note here: they left an optimal amount of matter to keep running experiments. Humans were kept in a controlled state and were studied to increase Swarm's intelligence), they launched next stage. A project, grand architect named "Optimise Energy capture from the Sun".
Nanobots re-created the most efficient ways of capturing the Sun energy - ancient plants, which swarm studied for centuries. Swarm added some upgrades on top of what nature came up with, but it was still built on top of what nature figured by itself. A perfect plant to capture the Sun's energy. All of them a perfect copy of itself + adaptive movements based on their geolocation and time(which makes all of them unique).
For plants nanobots needed water, so they created efficient oceans to feed the plants. They added clouds and rains as transport mechanism between oceans and plants... etc etc.
One night the human, which you already know by the name "Ivan the Liberator"(back then everyone called him just Ivan), didn't sleep on his usual hour. Suddenly all the lights went off and he saw a spark on the horizon. Horizon, that was strongly prohibited to approach. He took his rifle, jumped on a truck and raced to the shore - closest point to the spark vector.
Once he approached - there was no horizon or water. A wall of dark glass-like material, edges barely noticeable. Just 30 cm wide. On the left and on the right from a 30 cm wide wall - an image as real as his hands - of a water and sky. At the top of the wall - a hole. He used his gun to hit the wall with the light - and it wasn't very thick, but once he hit - it regenerated very quickly. But once he hit a black wall - it shattered and he saw a different world - world of plants.
He stepped into the forest, but these plants, were behaving differently. This part of the swarm wasn't supposed to face the human, so these nanobots never saw one and didn't have optimised instructions on what to do in that case. They started reporting new values back to the main computer and performing default behaviour until the updated software arrived from an intelligence center of the Swarm.
A human was observing a strange thing - plants were smoothly flowing around him to keep a safe distance, like water steps away from your hands in a pond.
"That's different" thought Ivan, extended his hand in a friendly gesture and said
- Nice to meet you. I'm Ivan.
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In this story a human sees a forest with plants and has no clue that it is a swarm of intelligence far greater than him. To him it looks repetitive simple action that doesn't look random -> let's test how intelligent outside entity is -> If entity wants to show its intelligence - it answers to communication -> If entity wants to hide its intelligence - it pretends to be not intelligent.
If Swarm decides to show you that it is intelligent - it can show you that it is intelligent up to your level. It won't be able to explain everything that it knows or understands to you, because you will be limited by your hardware. The limit for the Swarm is only computation power it can get.
