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> There are far too many problem domains that are beyond the capability of humans to solve to call human intelligence general intelligence. I'm curious about this. Is that simply not a limitation of our current knowledgebase? That is, as we figure out more about reality, we will eventually conquer those domains as well. Or do you mean there are domains that are provably beyond the structural capability of our brains? For instance, abstract things like higher-dimensional geometry or number theory which is hard for people to visualize "natively" in their brains. Yet people regularly solve problems in those types of fields. Sure, we rely on tools like computers or pen and paper, but we do solve those problems. Similarly, take your point about pancreas: sure, our brains cannot do the things it does, that is simply due to lack of the requisite "actuators" connecting our brains to the organ, an artifact of our evolution. But we do understand a lot of the biological mechanisms involved in its operation, enough to treat related problems, again through "tools" like medication and surgery. As we learn more about how they work, that increasingly becomes a problem domain our brains are "capable of solving." As such, I don't see how these examples show that the brain is not "generally intelligent", unless you exclude tool use, which to me seems like incorrectly conflating cognition and action. |
I think tools are fine depending on how you define a tool and its relationship to human intelligence. If we build an artificial pancreas that learns about the body its sitting in and is able to function just as well as a natural pancreas would we say humans solved this problem? In some sense because humans built the machine. But not in another sense because humans are not the machine. Just like we say "AlphaZero beat the world's best human chess player". We don't say usually say "the humans who designed AlphaZero beat the world's best chess player". Did the humans who designed AlphaZero master chess? Not necessarily.
My argument is that there are examples of cognition that we know the human brain currently doesn't operate in. Are these learnable by the human brain? We don't know yet so we can't say the human brain is completely general.
As I type this and as you read this our bodies are constantly rebuilding themselves. Maybe if you connect the appropriate actuators we can do the same thing with our conscious minds? I highly doubt it due to the nature of the problem and how inefficient the brain would be in solving this sort of problem. It likely wouldn't work, but it's too far for me to say "rovably beyond the structural capability of our brains". I'll just say "I'm very pleased I don't have to do that right now". Developing a living organism, either starting from a single cell or from a fully grown adult, in real time in the real world is a very difficult problem to solve and the human brain would be terribly inefficient at it.
These are just my opinions.