[emp17344]

It’s unlikely sensory data contributes to intelligence in human beings. Blind people take in far, far less sensory data than sighted people, and yet are no less intelligent. Think of Helen Keller - she was deafblind from an early age, and yet was far more intelligent than the average person. If your hypothesis is correct, and development of human intelligence is primarily driven by sensory data, how do you reconcile this with our observations of people with sensory impairments?

[jakeinspace]

Blind people tend to have less spatial intelligence though, like significantly more. Not very nice to say like that, and of course they often develop heightened intelligence in other areas, but we do consider human-level spatial reasoning a very important goal in AI.

[emp17344]

People with sensory impairments from birth may be restricted in certain areas, on account of the sensory impairment, but are no less generally cognitively capable than the average person.

[erichocean]

> but are no less generally cognitively capable than the average person

I think this would depend entirely on how the sensory impairment came about, since most genetic problems are not isolated, but carry a bunch of other related problems (all of which can impact intelligence).

Lose your eye sight in an accident? I would grant there is likely no difference on average.

Otherwise, the null hypothesis is that intelligence (and a whole host of other problems) are likely worse, on average.

[dpark]

> It’s unlikely sensory data contributes to intelligence in human beings.

This is clearly untrue. All information a human ever receives is through sensory data. Unless your position is that the intelligence of a brain that was grown in a vat with no inputs would be equivalent to that of a normal person.

Now, does rotating a coffee mug and feeling its weight, seeing it from different angles, etc. improve intelligence? Actually, still yes, if your intelligence test happens to include questions like “is this a picture of a mug” or “which of these objects is closest in weight to a mug”.

[emp17344]

>Unless your position is that the intelligence of a brain that was grown in a vat with no inputs would be equivalent to that of a normal person.

Entirely possible - we just don’t know. The closest thing we have to a real world case study is Helen Keller and other people with significant sensory impairments, who are demonstrably unimpaired in a general cognitive sense, and in many cases more cognitively capable than the average unimpaired person.

[dpark]

I think you are trying to argue for a very abstract notion of intelligence that is divorced from any practical measurement. I don’t know how else to interpret your claim that inputs are divorced from intelligence (and that we don’t know if the brain in a jar is intelligent).

This seems like a very philosophical standpoint, rather than practical. And I guess that’s fine, but I feel like the implication is that if an LLM is in some way intelligent, then it was exactly as intelligent before training. So we are talking about “potential intelligence“? Does a stack of GPU’s have “intelligence”?

[emp17344]

Intelligence isn’t rigorously defined or measurable, so any conversation about the nature of intelligence will be inherently philosophical. Like it or not, intelligence just is an abstract concept.

I’m trying to illustrate that the constraints that apply to LLMs don’t necessarily apply to humans. I don’t believe human intelligence is reliant upon sensory input.

[dpark]

It can’t be both. If intelligence is this abstract and philosophical then the claims about inputs not being relevant for human intelligence are meaningless. It’s equally meaningless to say that constraints on LLM intelligence don’t apply to human intelligence. In the absence of a meaningful definition of intelligence, these statements are not grounded in anything.

The term cannot mean something measurable or concrete when it’s convenient, but be vague and indefinable when it’s not.