I think it depends on your definition for 'intelligence'. IIRC, Wikipedia lists 15 different definitions for 'intelligence'. One common ground is 'the ability to solve problems', which covers some aspects of how the term 'intelligence' is usually used, but not necessarily everything.
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.
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.