| My views: The best definition of "intelligence" is "the degree of ability to correctly predict future outcomes based on past experience". Our cortex (part of the brain used for cognition/thinking) appears to be literally a prediction engine where predicted outcomes (what's going to happen next) are compared to sensory reality and updated on that basis (i.e. we learn by surprise - when we are wrong). This makes sense as an evolutionary pressure since ability to predict location of food sources, behavior of predators, etc, etc, is obviously a huge advantage over being directly reactive to sensory input in the way that simpler animals (e.g. insects) are. I'd define consciousness as the subjective experience of having a cognitive architecture that has particular feedback paths/connections. The fact that there is an architectural basis to consciousness would seem to be proved by impairments such as "blindsight" where one is able to see, but not conscious of that ability! (eg. ability to navigate a cluttered corridoor, while subjectively blind). It doesn't seem that consciousness is a requirement for intelligence ("ability to think"), although that predictive capability can presumably benefit from more information, so these feedback paths may well have evolutionary benefit. The reason a "string predictor on steroids" turns out to be able to do things that seem like thinking is because prediction is the essence of thinking/intelligence! Of course there's a lot internally missing from GPT-4 compared to our brain, for example basics like working memory (any internal state that persists from one output word to the next) and looping/iteration, but feeding it's own output back in does provide somewhat of a substitute for working memory, and external scripting/looping (AutoGPT, etc) goes a long way too. |