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by empath75
660 days ago
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I think one thing we've learned in the past 5 years or so is how inadequate our vocabulary is to describe all the different aspects of intelligence and consciousness (and really just psychology in general). Everything is so handwave-y. What is educability, exactly, in a formal sense -- how could we quantify it and measure it? Mostly we've tried to answer questions like that by writing tests and trying to tease out some reliable measure from it, but that requires so many layers of indirection -- it would be much better to examine the internal state and activity of a "thinking system" directly, something that is rarely possible in humans. I think one way to show that the tests are inadequate is to read the responses to people when those tests are applied to AI. People insist that they simply don't measure what they're supposed to measure in people when they're applied to AI, and for all anyone knows, they may be right -- but _why_? What _exactly_ are those tests measuring, and how could we measure it in a way that _would_ apply to artificial intelligence? These are philosophical questions that really, despite our best efforts, have never transitioned to a true science, and philosophy has been working on it for thousands of years. We've been hamstrung by the fact that as far as we knew, we were the only intelligent beings in the universe, so it's extremely difficult take any aspect of "the way we think" and separate it, by finding some system that thinks in some ways like us, but in other ways doesn't. It's really only been since we've had large neural networks that anything has approached the way we think in _any_ aspect, so this is probably a once-in-history opportunity to formalize and systematize all of this. |
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The particular problem here is complexity management. The 'problem' with thinking is it is a system, very possibly one of the largest and most complex systems we know about. Thinking as we know it in DNA based life is something that's at least 500 million years old and developed a few bits at a time. There is no unwinding the different components of the thinking from each other. Motor skills, reactions, learning, etc are all compressed and mixed together in the same code.
So, going from top down isn't working. But going the other way isn't working either. The computational complexity of a system that gets anywhere close to a biological thinking system requires quadrillions of calculations.