3 ms·

Yes, "signs of intelligence" include creativity, pedagogy, ..., and of course, getting bitten by the bug of existential angst. Accept no subsititute.

intrasight 10y ago
I will not accept any substitute. If there is no existential angst, I'll not accept referring to it as intelligence.
mbrock 10y ago
It seems pretty likely that we will start to see "General AI" discovering problematic things like the unsolvable nature of ethics questions, the ungroundedness of truth claims, the immense silliness of religions and ideologies, etc. Which might be a good thing. Terrifying visions of AI are all about certainty and the authoritarianism it creates. If existential depression is a mental friction from the lack of certainty about what to do, then some measure of it is probably necessary...
- eternalban 10y ago
  The encounter with doubt need not be a terminal state. If it is indeed "intelligent", it may proceed to enlightenment.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >Which might be a good thing. Terrifying visions of AI are all about certainty and the authoritarianism it creates. Indeed, may the gods protect us all from some things actually being true and other things actually being false. That would be terrible!
  - eternalban 10y ago
    (I sense/assume a missing /s in your post, Eli.) The objection here would be that entertaining that we can assert T/F of all propositions, given results of halting problem [computation], incompleteness [formalism], and uncertainty [physics], is unreasonable.
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      >The objection here would be that entertaining that we can assert T/F of all propositions, given results of halting problem [computation], incompleteness [formalism], and uncertainty [physics], is unreasonable. This displays a radical misunderstanding of the phenomena mentioned. The Halting Problem and logical incompleteness are the same thing underneath, and while they do hold in all formal systems, this never actually matters for non-meta-level mathematics. Basically any theorem about a structure we actually care about will be sub-Turing-complete, and with modern type theories, we can tear down inductive types and rebuild them with stronger axioms when we need to. As a result, some self-referencing theorems are true-but-unprovable, but we never actually need those theorems. Uncertainty in physics is either just probabilistic (in the case of typical experiments), or, in the special case of Heisenberg uncertainty... no actually, that's just probabilistic imprecision too. That's what Heisenberg's inequalities actually say: "the product of the standard deviations of these measurements must always be at least this much." Nowhere are we encountering the kind of radical, existential "we can't know anything and had better give up" uncertainty without which /u/mbrock seems to think we will all fall into political authoritarianism. He's been reading too many liberal philosophers of World War II, or maybe just watched that BBC thing "Dangerous Knowledge" and took it seriously.
      - eternalban 10y ago
        It seems irrelevant that, as of now, "any problem we care about" is sub-Turing-complete. We're still taking baby steps as a species and the relevant timelines in context of this thread are futuristic. Agreed? The point is that to maximally insist that "we can't know anything", and/or, "we can know everything" are both equally unreasonable positions. > Nowhere are we encountering the kind of radical, existential "we can't know anything and had better give up" uncertainty without which /u/mbrock seems to think we will all fall into political authoritarianism. He's been reading too many liberal philosophers of World War II, or maybe just watched that BBC thing "Dangerous Knowledge" and took it seriously. S/he can address your concerns -- that was not my intent, but hopefully you agree that unreasonable insistence on maximalist positions inherently carries the danger of "political" authoritarianism. Your practical position reminds of a purported exchange between Wittgenstein and Turing, per Hewitt [ref]. I am sympathetic to it. But reminder again that my initial comments here were in context of intelligent machines. In fact as I am writing this little note, I am entertaining the thought that a veritable intelligent machine may in fact review the 3 (methodological) constraints noted, and shrug it off as practically unimportant. Or it may become alarmed. :) [edit/p.s. ref:http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4302 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4302]

intrasight 10y ago

I will not accept any substitute. If there is no existential angst, I'll not accept referring to it as intelligence.

mbrock 10y ago

It seems pretty likely that we will start to see "General AI" discovering problematic things like the unsolvable nature of ethics questions, the ungroundedness of truth claims, the immense silliness of religions and ideologies, etc. Which might be a good thing. Terrifying visions of AI are all about certainty and the authoritarianism it creates. If existential depression is a mental friction from the lack of certainty about what to do, then some measure of it is probably necessary...

eternalban 10y ago
The encounter with doubt need not be a terminal state. If it is indeed "intelligent", it may proceed to enlightenment.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>Which might be a good thing. Terrifying visions of AI are all about certainty and the authoritarianism it creates. Indeed, may the gods protect us all from some things actually being true and other things actually being false. That would be terrible!
- eternalban 10y ago
  (I sense/assume a missing /s in your post, Eli.) The objection here would be that entertaining that we can assert T/F of all propositions, given results of halting problem [computation], incompleteness [formalism], and uncertainty [physics], is unreasonable.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >The objection here would be that entertaining that we can assert T/F of all propositions, given results of halting problem [computation], incompleteness [formalism], and uncertainty [physics], is unreasonable. This displays a radical misunderstanding of the phenomena mentioned. The Halting Problem and logical incompleteness are the same thing underneath, and while they do hold in all formal systems, this never actually matters for non-meta-level mathematics. Basically any theorem about a structure we actually care about will be sub-Turing-complete, and with modern type theories, we can tear down inductive types and rebuild them with stronger axioms when we need to. As a result, some self-referencing theorems are true-but-unprovable, but we never actually need those theorems. Uncertainty in physics is either just probabilistic (in the case of typical experiments), or, in the special case of Heisenberg uncertainty... no actually, that's just probabilistic imprecision too. That's what Heisenberg's inequalities actually say: "the product of the standard deviations of these measurements must always be at least this much." Nowhere are we encountering the kind of radical, existential "we can't know anything and had better give up" uncertainty without which /u/mbrock seems to think we will all fall into political authoritarianism. He's been reading too many liberal philosophers of World War II, or maybe just watched that BBC thing "Dangerous Knowledge" and took it seriously.
    - eternalban 10y ago
      It seems irrelevant that, as of now, "any problem we care about" is sub-Turing-complete. We're still taking baby steps as a species and the relevant timelines in context of this thread are futuristic. Agreed? The point is that to maximally insist that "we can't know anything", and/or, "we can know everything" are both equally unreasonable positions. > Nowhere are we encountering the kind of radical, existential "we can't know anything and had better give up" uncertainty without which /u/mbrock seems to think we will all fall into political authoritarianism. He's been reading too many liberal philosophers of World War II, or maybe just watched that BBC thing "Dangerous Knowledge" and took it seriously. S/he can address your concerns -- that was not my intent, but hopefully you agree that unreasonable insistence on maximalist positions inherently carries the danger of "political" authoritarianism. Your practical position reminds of a purported exchange between Wittgenstein and Turing, per Hewitt [ref]. I am sympathetic to it. But reminder again that my initial comments here were in context of intelligent machines. In fact as I am writing this little note, I am entertaining the thought that a veritable intelligent machine may in fact review the 3 (methodological) constraints noted, and shrug it off as practically unimportant. Or it may become alarmed. :) [edit/p.s. ref:http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4302 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4302]