[extropy-chat] Extreme Intelligence

[Russell Wallace]

On 8/3/06, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at tsoft.com> wrote:
>
> I explained later in my post: limited to the same senses. Also,
> though, I should have indeed said something like: consisting
> of a single cerebral cortex. I definitely want to exclude some
> kind of arbitrary multi-minded computronium-based solution,
> because probably no one could argue that *that* would not be
> possible.


Well that's the question - senses are easy enough, we already have many
devices for extending those, but are you assuming there's still a
restriction to biological neurons operating at 200 Hz, or are you assuming
molecular electronics at 2 GHz or what? Not that it makes any difference to
the conclusions, but I'm curious about what you meant.

Of course. But as a measure of g, that is, of cognitive ability,
> it serves astoundingly well.


Considering that g/cognitive ability are usually defined as performance on
IQ tests, it would be rather surprising if it didn't :)

You are, of course, quite right about knowledge. But the rate
> at which knowledge can be acquired is surely commensurate with
> intelligence, wouldn't you say?


It's related to intelligence, or rather intelligence is related to it; if an
entity is good at acquiring knowledge quickly, we tend to say that entity is
intelligent.

It's also, however, related to the rate at which knowledge is available.

As for extending IQ, recall how chess and some other straight-
> forward tasks work.


Chess is a straightforward task, yes. Specifically, of the four levels of
difficulty:

1. NP-hard
2. EXPTIME-hard
3. Incomputable
4. Ill-posed problem

Simple games like chess don't normally go past level 2; real world problems
tend to be at level 4; so we can't draw too many useful conclusions from
chess.

Though it does suffice to demolish the idea of a canonical intelligence
scale: how intelligent is Deep Blue?

By considering a huge variety of tasks, perhaps it becomes
> possible to describe a level of intelligence X such that X
> is to 200 as 200 is to 180, and then to call that 220. In
> other words, we take enough samples of tasks demanding
> cognitive capability, and calibrate our measure accordingly.


But people with IQs of say 180, greatly differ among themselves in ability
to perform tasks other than taking IQ tests. And that's just members of H.
sapiens with the same basic architecture; the differences among minds in
general will obviously be far larger.

(By the way, your examples of wisdom and social skills simply
> don't correlate with cognitive ability as measured by
> practitioners in the field; they're pretty much in agreement
> on this.)


Exactly.

I wish I knew how you are so confident. Are you saying that
> it's flat out impossible no matter how smart a piece of matter
> is?


Yes.

I must
> hasten to say that by allowing a week (or a month, whatever),
> I am supposing that lengthy and costly experiments do not need
> to me done, and I could be entirely wrong.


That's what I'm saying - if you want to solve a problem, you need the
relevant data, which means you need to do the experiments. If you just make
up the data, the results won't correspond to reality. GIGO.

Somehow, it seems
> strikingly interesting and peculiar if it emerged that no matter
> how smart some piece of matter was, all it could do would be to
> shrug and say "the data simply is not available, and you would
> have to do the following 26 experiments...".


Why would you regard it as peculiar that it's not possible to calculate
answers without the required data? Most of the things we want to know cannot
be deduced from the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory because they
simply do not logically follow from those axioms.

Why isn't it a mathematical function of an information processing
> system?
>

Because the answers we want are not functions or properties of the
information processing system or its internal symbolisms - they are
properties of the real world.
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