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> That requires having gone to new york, having tastes, having judgements, having memory -- having a subjectivity which is unique and composed of the history of

> That requires having gone to new york, having tastes, having judgements, having memory -- having a subjectivity which is unique and composed of the history of your experiences which can be related to novel environemnts. It requres existing in a shared world we can both co-refer to with our words. It requires being embedded in a space of social and physical significance. are you saying that I would not be considered an intelligent being if I had a jar in a brain left with my thoughts since my birth ? I don't think that this is what humans mean by intelligence... also I don't really see the fundamental difference between "tastes", "judgements" and "memory" - making a judgment, having an opinion on something, etc... is just stopping the brain from reasoning past a certain step and internally saying "this is good enough" most likely because this is tiring to our frail physical bodies. Like, I don't like eating eggs for instance, but that's just because I don't make the effort of convincing myself that I like them. There's no intelligence in this, just laziness.

mjburgess 4y ago
Yes, you wouldnt be intelligent if you were literally a brain in a jar.. you'd have nothing to say. You dont have any "thoughts at birth". A brain absent stimulation from the environment, doesnt do anything. The brain-in-the-jar example presumes that the whole nervous system receives identical stimulation as-if it were embedded in the world. Incidentally, this is what people mean by intelligence... by since no one has studied the relevant science, people do not know what's required to provide it.
- jcelerier 4y ago
  > The brain-in-the-jar example presumes that the whole nervous system receives identical stimulation as-if it were embedded in the world. I should have chosen a similar sounding thing, I really meant what I said, not the original brain-in-a-jar thought experiment. > Incidentally, this is what people mean by intelligence... by since no one has studied the relevant science, people do not know what's required to provide it. I don't understand how these two sentences work together: the word's meaning is defined by its usage. If tomorrow most people in the world says that being intelligent is defined by waking up at 6AM and doing 10 jumping jacks every day, then that is what the word will mean whether you want it or not. In my "human frame of reference", "Yes, you wouldnt be intelligent if you were literally a brain in a jar.." really does not square with how intelligence is talked about for instance so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    You name things intelligent; then you have a theory as to why you name them that way. Your theory is wrong. Those thing which count as intelligent aren't intelligent because they're finding statistical associations in historical datasets that have been pre-made and pre-disambiguated by people. You don't know this, because any time you theorise to explain, you require empirical investigation and decades/centuries of science. You cannot be "right by definition", you're not omniscient. The reason that animals are intelligent isnt their cognition, narrowly. It's their bodies, broadly, which produce the input cognition requires. In "doing all the hard work" by manufacturing data for machiens to process, we can produce computational models of cognition -- but these immitate intelligence, precisley because, the thing which we call intelligent is the very production of that data.
    - jcelerier 4y ago
      > You name things intelligent; then you have a theory as to why you name them that way. but here a human being (and I suspect not the only one) names a computer program as "intelligent". The theory has to take this case into account to make it fit in its definition of intelligence: the will of human beings naming things overrides everything else. Maybe there is something else that humans have and this program doesn't, but another name has to be found for it if enough humans agree that this fit as what "intelligent" means. > You cannot be "right by definition", you're not omniscient. This doesn't make sense. Definitions are outside rightness / wrongness.
      - mjburgess 4y ago
        Ah, well if you start this project by calling present AI intelligent, then you're right. I take the A to apply to the I, ie., AI is artificially Intelligent. Its not actually intelligent. We didnt arrive at a notion of intelligent via digital computers. We have been talking about it for thousands of years, at least. I am talking about the pretheoretical, intuitive notion of intelligence that doesn't prejudge the question of AI. What is it we call intelligent? Intelligence is a kind of rapid adaption and coping to environmental change. It's a way of being responsive to an environment. Its a kind of radical underminism of response: a thermometer's response is determined. An animal, in having reasons to do things, is radically under-determined. And thus, in acquriing specific hisotries, animals bring their own reasons to environemnts, and thus are able to cope with a vast amount of sudden change that would, eg., destroy a thermometer. And what we are concerned with, both with real AI, and with animals is systems which are in the world with us, in this way: that are likewise radically able to cope.

mjburgess 4y ago

Yes, you wouldnt be intelligent if you were literally a brain in a jar.. you'd have nothing to say. You dont have any "thoughts at birth". A brain absent stimulation from the environment, doesnt do anything. The brain-in-the-jar example presumes that the whole nervous system receives identical stimulation as-if it were embedded in the world. Incidentally, this is what people mean by intelligence... by since no one has studied the relevant science, people do not know what's required to provide it.

jcelerier 4y ago
> The brain-in-the-jar example presumes that the whole nervous system receives identical stimulation as-if it were embedded in the world. I should have chosen a similar sounding thing, I really meant what I said, not the original brain-in-a-jar thought experiment. > Incidentally, this is what people mean by intelligence... by since no one has studied the relevant science, people do not know what's required to provide it. I don't understand how these two sentences work together: the word's meaning is defined by its usage. If tomorrow most people in the world says that being intelligent is defined by waking up at 6AM and doing 10 jumping jacks every day, then that is what the word will mean whether you want it or not. In my "human frame of reference", "Yes, you wouldnt be intelligent if you were literally a brain in a jar.." really does not square with how intelligence is talked about for instance so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- mjburgess 4y ago
  You name things intelligent; then you have a theory as to why you name them that way. Your theory is wrong. Those thing which count as intelligent aren't intelligent because they're finding statistical associations in historical datasets that have been pre-made and pre-disambiguated by people. You don't know this, because any time you theorise to explain, you require empirical investigation and decades/centuries of science. You cannot be "right by definition", you're not omniscient. The reason that animals are intelligent isnt their cognition, narrowly. It's their bodies, broadly, which produce the input cognition requires. In "doing all the hard work" by manufacturing data for machiens to process, we can produce computational models of cognition -- but these immitate intelligence, precisley because, the thing which we call intelligent is the very production of that data.
  - jcelerier 4y ago
    > You name things intelligent; then you have a theory as to why you name them that way. but here a human being (and I suspect not the only one) names a computer program as "intelligent". The theory has to take this case into account to make it fit in its definition of intelligence: the will of human beings naming things overrides everything else. Maybe there is something else that humans have and this program doesn't, but another name has to be found for it if enough humans agree that this fit as what "intelligent" means. > You cannot be "right by definition", you're not omniscient. This doesn't make sense. Definitions are outside rightness / wrongness.
    - mjburgess 4y ago
      Ah, well if you start this project by calling present AI intelligent, then you're right. I take the A to apply to the I, ie., AI is artificially Intelligent. Its not actually intelligent. We didnt arrive at a notion of intelligent via digital computers. We have been talking about it for thousands of years, at least. I am talking about the pretheoretical, intuitive notion of intelligence that doesn't prejudge the question of AI. What is it we call intelligent? Intelligence is a kind of rapid adaption and coping to environmental change. It's a way of being responsive to an environment. Its a kind of radical underminism of response: a thermometer's response is determined. An animal, in having reasons to do things, is radically under-determined. And thus, in acquriing specific hisotries, animals bring their own reasons to environemnts, and thus are able to cope with a vast amount of sudden change that would, eg., destroy a thermometer. And what we are concerned with, both with real AI, and with animals is systems which are in the world with us, in this way: that are likewise radically able to cope.