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While I can empathize with these thoughts, I hear them from people who I think have brilliant ideas, like Karl Popper N.N. Taleb, something about this sort of definition of intelligence and the strictness of forms I think it implies rubs me as presumptive and confused as the claims its critiquing. For instance, what about the subconscious? The subconscious must play a strong role in problem solving and creativity, which is how I notice intelligence, anybody I think who has written a piece of music or struggled with a proof can attest to that. But are there abstractions at play when the unconscious is in the driver seat? And if the unconscious speaks in abstractions, are they the same "form" abstractions the conscious mind is so familiar with? Consider some different form of abstraction, informed by and tooled by information and methods you are not privy to. Moreover, if humans did have unlimited short term memory size, suppose we had to find what numbers are divisible by a prime, how many of us would be checking numbers individually in our head and not using Fermat's Little Theorem? Suppose such memory allows us to discover new methods of compaction, wait then, we are playing the same game again and perhaps that would lead us to the presumption that we do it because our working memory is not "good" enough. Then "intelligence," which we outside of ourselves can only perceive in the ways it is demonstrable, and what motivates it, seems less then about the journey to compact information into coherence, producing objects for an inventory and thereby producing some super-order of workshopping, and more about heuristic success in pragmatic material terms. These are terms I'd argue out of the scope of "conscious" abstraction, hence the rejection of such ideas/thoughts on account of their supposed duplicity. But I don't know if the same can be said for the unconscious. It seems to me then that so called compression, conscious abstraction, is more than an evolutionarily-devised-resource-scarcity-solution, it's baked in, *ontologically*. We are, in part, motivated to look for solutions not necessarily on account of our limitations but because we can imagine solutions. I do anticipate your eye roll. I would posit then, part of what is at play for what I'll term demonstrable intelligence, is the degree to which the conscious mind has strength in itself as an abstraction workstation and how much access the "unconscious" mind seems to grant it to other spheres of tooling. In this sense, not only is the success of abstractions and their varieties relevant, but those very attributes of the abstractions are informed by the diversity and complexity of a little something else. So sure, the map is not the territory and the cat is in my mind and not necessarily a reflection of the material reality, but I think we exaggerate the problems in abstractions/forms because we are unsatisfied with the whole enterprise of consciously accessing the territory in the first place. |
I just take what I've read from psychology, sociology, statistics, and AI/ML and synthesize them into a critical lens. Maybe it's right in some ways, wrong in others.
It's a framework for stepping back and challenging our assumptions and giving space for us to ask, "Where did that assumption come from? And, why should I take that for granted?" and that's usually a good thing.