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What does it mean to "understand something"? Why don't we consider "big lump of axons and dendrons" to be an understanding? To me at least, understanding is qu
by ummwhat 6y ago
What does it mean to "understand something"? Why don't we consider "big lump of axons and dendrons" to be an understanding?
To me at least, understanding is quantified by the difference between the number of bits in your model and the number of bits in the thing you want to understand. "True understanding" is when you've gotten the model down to a small enough size that you can fit it in your head. But there is no a priori law that everything interesting in the universe should be able to fit in your head. We've just been lucky so far. Maybe we will keep making progress understanding how consciousness works, but never shrink it down far enough that we are satisfied with the "explanation".
- plutonorm 6y agoI agree. This is the only definition that matters. People are confused because the language we use to talk about this stuff is full of assumptions and misunderstandings that leak into their logical reasoning. Imho, compression is a perfectly adequate description of intelligence. This is why GPT-3 does so well, intelligence is an emergent property of predictive power. Marcus Hutter really needs to rejig his compression challenge to allow much larger models, it could really be relevant to judging progress.