An Act of Intelligence is the concrete token-execution of an intelligence-faculty — the second actuality (deutera energeia) as opposed to the faculty as first actuality. Concrete acts of intelligence are perceiving, judging, inferring, remembering, and arguing.
Faculty and Execution
The distinction follows the Aristotelian doctrine of act and potency. A faculty (prote energeia, first actuality) is the habitus, the essential form of the rational nature; the act (deutera energeia, second actuality) is its execution in a concrete doing. The sleeping, the not-yet-thinking, the demented human being has the faculty without performing an act at that moment.
The act of intelligence thus stands on the side of execution: it is not what makes a bearer an intelligent substance, but what actualizes that substance. The faculty is primary; the act is a consequence of the faculty — not its measure.
Significance for the AI Question
The distinction between faculty and act is the pivot of the substance-ontological conception of intelligence. A bearer of intelligence can produce outputs that look like acts of intelligence — without any substantial faculty in the first person underlying them. Whoever equates act and faculty infers, from observable execution, a bearer that does not exist.
Hence the rule: an act of intelligence in the strict sense is the execution of a faculty by its bearer. A simulated surface of acts without an underlying faculty is not an act of intelligence, but its functional imitation.
Ontological Classification
- second actuality (deutera energeia) of an intelligence-faculty
- belongs to the act-potency structure
- the execution-side of the substance-ontological conception of intelligence
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Aristotle, De anima II–III (Bekker pagination); on deutera energeia II 1, 412a.
- Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 79.