[wombatmobile]

The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0494-4

What he means is that computers, which can learn rules and use those rules to make predictions in certain domains, nevertheless cannot exercise general intelligence because they are not "in the world". This renders them unable to experience and parse culture, most of which is tacit in real time, and sustained by enduring mental models which we experience as "expectations" that we navigate with our emotions and senses.

Culture is the platform on which intelligence is manifest, because the usefulness of knowledge is not absolute - it is contextual and social.

[cperciva]

The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all.

Similarly, nuclear submarines, which lacking all of the critical organs of fish, are completely unable to swim.

[fellow_human]

Similarly, a brick has the ability to deep sea dive!

[cpach]

The nuclear submarine is just part of our extended phenotype :)

[feoren]

A good example of why philosophers are utterly useless mental masturbators who spend all their time arguing about definitions of words. Here he takes something obviously stupid and wrong and says it in such a way that you can feel smart by regurgitating it. Computers don't exist in the world? What? It must be some problem with their Thetans. Er, sorry, I mean "qualia".

[NaturalPhallacy]

>The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all.

I feel like that's utter nonsense. What the things we misname 'AIs' today don't lack intelligence. They lack motivation. Goals. It has nothing to do with childhood or culture. It's not What™ or How™ that is missing but Why™.

For example even the dumbest 'living' organism is motivated to reproduce. Even if it doesn't know why. But since all the ones that weren't didn't, they died out and all we're left with are the ones that do.

And humans without a Why™ strongly resemble what we call depressed.

[tiborsaas]

This is why all AI today falls o to the narrow AI category. It just often omitted because it's true for all of them.

[colinmhayes]

Imagine being a dualist in the 21st century.

[goatlover]

What in the parent post is dualist? Sounds more like an argument that animals have embodied intelligence.

But as for being a dualist in the 21st century, there is always consciousness, information and math. All three of which can lead to some form of dualism/platonism.

[mcguire]

Many of Dreyfuss' and other similar arguments reduce do dualism when you start digging into them. I don't have the time to dig into the specific article, but here's some immediate questions:

1. What is special about a body that makes it impossible to have intelligence without it? (a) Is it possible for a quadriplegic person to be intelligent? (b) A blind and deaf person? ((c)What about that guy from Johnny Got His Gun?)

2. What is special about a childhood such that a machine cannot have it?

3. Would a person transplanted into a completely alien culture not be intelligent?

What is fundamentally being argued is the definition of "intelligence", and there are many fixed points of those arguments. Unfortunately, most of them (such as those that answer "no", "probably not", and "definitely not" to 1a, 1b, and 1c) don't really satisfy the intuitive meaning of "intelligence". That, and the general tone of the arguments, seem to imply the only acceptable meaning is dualism.

For example, "...there is always consciousness, information and math...": without a tight, and very technical, definition of consciousness, that seems to be assuming the conclusion. With a tight, and very technical, definition of consciousness, what is the problem with a machine demonstrating it?

Information? Check out knowledge, "justified true belief", and the Gettier problem (https://courses.physics.illinois.edu/phys419/sp2019/Gettier....).

Math? Me, I'm a formalist. It's all a game that we've made up the rules to.

[goatlover]

> Many of Dreyfuss' and other similar arguments reduce do dualism when you start digging into them. I don't have the time to dig into the specific article, but here's some immediate questions:

To me it sounds dualist if intelligence is disembodied. If the substrate doesn't matter, only the functionality, then that sounds like there's something additional to the world than just the physical constintuents. But of course, embodied versions of intelligence need to answer the sort of questions you posed. It should be noticed that Dreyfuss wrote his objections in the 50s and 60s during the period of classical AI. I don't know whether he addressed the question of robot children, or simulated childhoods. We don't have the sort of thing even today, and we also don't have AGI. Some of his objections still stand, although machine learning and robotics research has made inroads.

> Math? Me, I'm a formalist. It's all a game that we've made up the rules to.

So why is physics so heavily reliant on mathematics? Quite a few physicists think the world has a mathematical structure.

> For example, "...there is always consciousness, information and math...": without a tight, and very technical, definition of consciousness, that seems to be assuming the conclusion.

Qualia would be the philosophical term for subjective experiences of color, sound, pain, etc. Reducing those to their material correlations has been notoriously difficult, and there is still no agreement on what that entails.

As for information, some scientists have been exploring the idea that chemical space leads to the emergence of information as an additional thing to physics which needs to be incorporated into our scientific understanding of the world. That we can't really explain biology without it.

[mcguire]

:-)

"To me it sounds dualist if intelligence is disembodied. If the substrate doesn't matter, only the functionality, then that sounds like there's something additional to the world than just the physical constintuents."

Off the top of my head, what the substrate is doesn't matter, but that there is a substrate does. Intelligence is the behavior of the physical constituents.

"So why is physics so heavily reliant on mathematics? Quite a few physicists think the world has a mathematical structure."

Because humans are very good at defining the rules when we need them? Because alternate rules are nothing but a curiosity even to mathematicians unless there is a use---such as a physical process---for them?

One of the problems with qualia, as a topic of discussion, is that I can never be entirely sure that you have it. I can assume you do, and rocks don't, but that is about as far as I can get.

[wombatmobile]

Don't overthink this.

If you put a computer in a room with a hot babe, a 3 layer chocolate cake, a bottle of the finest whisky or bourbon, the keys to a Porsche, and a trillion dollars in cash, what would it do?

Yeah, nothing. The computer is not in the world.

[TchoBeer]

What if we build a computer that would do something with those things? Additionally, if I care about neither food nor drink nor money nor cars, am I not in the world?

[wombatmobile]

> (a) Is it possible for a quadriplegic person to be intelligent? (b) A blind and deaf person?

Yes of course, because all of those people have ambitions and desires. They feel pain and they seek pleasure, which they experience through their bodies.

Imagine if the world 2,000 years from now was populated only by supercomputers, all the lifeforms having perished.

What are these computers going to do with the planet?

[colinmhayes]

Why can't a computer have ambitions and desires? Why can't it seek pleasure and feel pain? The only answer is dualism or we don't know how to wire it properly yet.

[goatlover]

Or we don't have the proper design. If we want machines to be like animals, maybe we need to make them that way. Like the replicants in Blade Runner, or the humanoid "toasters" in the recent Battlestar Galactica.

[colinmhayes]

> cannot exercise general intelligence because they are not "in the world".

Implies dualism. In a materialist world a computer can learn anything given the proper structure and stimuli.

[wombatmobile]

The limitation is more practical than theoretical or philosophical.

Consider this line from an Eagles song:

“City girls just seem to find out early, how to open doors with just a smile.”

What does that mean to you?

Disembodied computers don’t get the experiences required to gain that intelligence, and even if they could go along for the ride, in a helmet cam, they wouldn't experience the tingling in their heart, lungs and genitals that provide the signals for learning.

[goatlover]

Yes, but the key is the proper structure and stimuli, which animal intelligence gets through having a body. Can we get computers to have the same sort of intelligence without a synthetic body? This becomes more of a robotics versus traditional AI debate. Think Rodney Brooks versus Marvin Minsky.

[shrimpx]

Where’s the dualism? It sounds like just a peculiar definition of learning.