It is cool, but not intelligence.
very simple organisms can't do that, at all. you really do need something with a lot of internal state and state-transition structure (ie, neurons) to do that.
Anyone who likes The Thought Emporium should watch his talk and branch out from there; you'll be amazed.
Your reductionist argument is as oversimplified as saying "Earth is just the cooled ejaculate of a supernova." True at some level, but only at a level without practical meaning for most purposes. It sounds cool and insightful. It isn't.
A mechanism that makes a rotor go one way or the other as a function of the time derivative of a variable would not qualify as such.
Now, if you have a trillion such mecanisms atuned and feeding one anothers inputs in a network... Well you just got yourself a brain and then we can start talking about intelligence.
It is more than just "cool". Furthermore, I would probe and inquiry what you actually mean by a positive definition of intelligence so we can get the claim better instead of a negative defintion.
If you have a trillion neurons, some doing basinc control stuff like the one before, with others forming systems that tweak or reroute the others depending on other, emergent potentials, then you have intelligence.
If the brain activity stops being only external information driven and starts being internal information driven (this is, it can change how it regulates stuff o even the stuff it regulates, at different levels of consciousness) then we start talking about something more than information processing.
Your eyes are just a series of mechanisms by which photons are converted into electric signals via proteins that react to the impact of a photon. "Seeing" is mechanical. "Feeling" is mechanical. Receiving and sending the messages is "mechanical". At what point is intelligence separate?
I can't control _how_ my intelligence works, and neither can e-coli.
My "intelligence" is the sum total emergent self-referential molecularly-mechanical signal-processing network that holds state. My DNA holds the state of all of my ancestors on top of which my own environmental changes are laid. My neurons hold the sum-total of my experiences, allowing me to introspect.
Here's my test: - I am intelligent. I have an internal representation of the world that shapes my behavior, and I react to my environment. I can choose to do "irrational" things.
- A mouse is "intelligent" but less than a human. It has a representation of the world that shapes its behavior, and it reacts to its environment. Mice can choose to do "irrational" things like care for their young, and form attachments with humans.
- A mosquito is "intelligent" but less than a mouse. It still has an internal experience of the world that shapes its behavior. It does not care for its young, nor does it form attachments (that we know of).
- Down, and down we go, one thing staying constant -- there is an internal representation of "the world" that guides an organism's behavior. It is an emergent quality of the interaction of mechanical sensory systems working at a molecular level where the goal is survival and reproduction if possible.
I think its intelligence. ymmv
If your 'problem' as a cell is to feed yourself, it is a clever apparatus that solves that problem, and can be depicted as intelligent.
If you understand the 'fully automatic mechanism' completely, you agree that it solves a problem, but you deny that this is intelligent. However, the denial depends on your understanding of the mechanism. If you assume that the world is deterministic (that means, every effect has a definite cause, to put it simply), we cannot be something other than a 'fully automatic mechanism', however a very, very complicated one that we do not fully understand. Indeed, in a deterministic world nothing can be different from a 'fully automatic mechanism', and, by your implied definition of intelligence, nothing can be intelligent. This conclusion leaves the definition of intelligence as something 'other than fully automatic mechanism' rather useless, as it does not distinguish anything. (If you do assume that the world is not deterministic, a similar argument still holds, as long as you do not imply that a person can determine the outcome of the non-determinism, which sounds strange to me to imply.)
I think what you want for something to call 'intelligent', is that you don't immediately understand how the mechanism works and the assumption of some kind of thought process and/or planning. The first property unfortunately depends on what you might consider your own intelligence, which makes it difficult as an objective measure of intelligence so that you can argue about it in a forum. The second property (thinking/planning) might be present in the cell in a way that you don't see (eg. see storage of the current value of 'now') and, similary, it might not be present in us humans in the way self-perceive it.
More than once did I experience a seemingly 'intelligent system' that I found fasciniating, which, after I studied it, I did not think of as intelligent anymore (eg. my first impressions of Weizenbaum's Eliza), which for the aforementioned reasons I think is kind-of silly of me.
I personally define it as more of an emergent property where you increase the complexity of the problem solving machine to the point where it begins to be more than just interconnected automatisms.
Maybe it could be said that processing information is not intelligence by itself. Intelligence, for me, requires the ability to adapt the way one processes information to the task at hand, either by changing it entirely of adapting and tuning to get more out of it.
A fixed mechanism that controls a variable can't be intelligent.
e.g. One reasonable definition of intelligence is ability to use prior experience to fruitfully guide future behavior, and if you look at the spectrum of animal intelligence it seems most useful not to have some arbitrary cutoff or mechanism attached to that. A simple animal like an insect, or a bacterium, has effectively encoded the prior experience of the species, in a relatively stable environment, into its DNA.
Animals with more complex nervous systems have ability to learn as individuals in their own lifetime, and display intelligence according to what they have individually experienced, although they too will have been born with some species-level intelligence as to how to survive & thrive in their environment.