There are many candidates for what could be considered to be an intelligent agent. Examples include humans, animals, aliens, AI (e.g. ChatGPT?), and supernaturalists would probably add angels, deities, God or gods, and similar candidates to the list as well. So, if we want to talk about "some" intelligent agent in an abstract general sense, without specifying the exact nature or identity of this agent, we need a robust and general definition of intelligence. Related questions such as What is intelligence? and How do philosophers understand intelligence (beyond artificial intelligence)? are probably relevant here.
So my question is twofold:
- Is there a robust, general theory of intelligence and design that can simultaneously encompass all the entities that people normally would consider to be intelligent and capable of producing some sort of design?
- Assuming we have such a theory, would it be possible in principle to establish that some concrete object shows evidence of design by some intelligent agent (in this general abstract sense), solely by studying the properties of said object?
