The No Body Problem: Intelligence and Selfhood in Biological and Artificial Systems

Do you need a body to be an intelligent system? Clearly not. Artificial systems such as Large Language Models do not have a body and yet they are promptly qualified as intelligent and even conscious. But what exactly is intelligence? And do you need a body to be “somebody”, i.e. a self? What is the relationship between selfhood and intelligence in biological and artificial (dis)embodied systems? This paper aims to address this question by looking at the link be-tween information processing and homeostatic self-regulation. I propose to distinguish between cumulative (i.e. quan-titative) versus qualitative information processing in artificial and biological self-organising systems. Specifically, I argue that the latter but not the former have to face major time limit constraints due to impending death (i.e. homeosta-sis failure). For living systems there is an end, hence there is an end, a finality, a goal. As finite beings, biological sys-tems must first learn to carefully strike a balance between what information is worth qualitatively processing for their body survival, and what information the system must “let go” and discard. By contrast, artificial intelligence pro-cesses rapidly a quantitatively impressive amount of information in a purely cumulative way, as if eternity and infi-nite, unlimited energetic resources were available to them. By having a no body problem, these systems have no death problem. However, in real worlds (as opposed to abstract formal worlds), resources are not infinite, and thus eternity is not available to artificial systems either. Since the latter are a product of human mind design, they remain depend-ent on human computing and earthly energetic resources. I conclude that from the wider perspective of biological life (i.e. limited time and energy constrained self-organising systems), artificial intelligence-based systems are less adap-tive and hence less “smart” than biological intelligence-based systems.