Agreed. I also think that debate has evolved to the point where it tends to be solely focused on winning arguments. It has always had a bit of that, but it also used to serve as the most effective way to exchange ideas and develop new perspectives.

The kind of debate where one person is genuinely open to changing their mind (which often leads to the most productive discourse, although not necessarily the most entertaining depending on who you ask) just isn’t suited for politicians who oppose one another and are vying for the same thing. That could be a certain office, or simply power itself, or just attention.

Now the point of political debate is mostly to make your opponents views look less appealing, usually by winning the argument, mostly in very subjective ways. Even when it’s supposed to be casual, people just can’t let go of the polity of it all because of politicized everything has become. Productive discourse can still happen, but truly novel ideas that appeal strongly to both sides of an issue seem to come few and far between.

An open written correspondence between the two parties on the subject, or a published transcript of a private call, but no one would pay any fucking attention to those things

I’d say there’s some validity to that except that there are plenty of other species with brains that are ‘dedicated to intelligence’ that aren’t very intelligent and by some standards are barely sentient or not sentient whatsoever, depending on who you ask

It’s definitely not the same as a brain making conscious decisions, but the ability to change its reaction level in certain pathways to alter its response to different kinds of stimuli over time is very similar to what happens to our brains as we develop and learn new things, I would say that makes it a kind of intelligence that’s different from ours but still very much a real form of intelligence

There’s a big difference between general intelligence and other types but that doesn’t make one type any more or less than another

I think it’s fair to say this kind of intelligence could be considered a component of general intelligence but GI is such a broad and amorphous concept, almost anything could

That kind of adjustment is similar to how neural nets are adjusted in machine learning, which itself is derived from how our brains learn things. I think that makes it a type of intelligence in its own way. Obviously it’s less sophisticated than a brain and not quite sentience, but it’s still quite remarkable

I agree with your assessment but we should make a distinction between self-aware intelligences (aka consciousness) as an emergent property of a complex system, and biological/ecological intelligence, which is arguably just as complex in its own way, but shaped by totally different factors (natural selection, evolution, genetics, environment, etc.)

It’s inappropriate to compare it to sentience but it is a form of intelligence, just not in the way we usually define it when referring to ourselves or other organisms