The simplest definition of intelligence I use is one's capcity for abstraction. Is a mind capable of generalizing accurately and then refining it with some good

The simplest definition of intelligence I use is one's capcity for abstraction. Is a mind capable of generalizing accurately and then refining it with some good tools for feedback? Pattern recognition is close, as it's abstracting things into symbols and then comparing the symbols, but it's not sufficient. "Smart" I define as the ability to effect intentions, or to get what you want. In this sense, a lot of intelligent people are not very smart, and a lot of very smart people are unhindered by intelligence. Animals are perfectly smart for their environment without needing much intelligence. Humans are poorly adapted to our physical environment, and require a great deal more intelligence to have survived. Language is useful for many things, but the things it isn't good for are anti-smart (e.g. I think our ego as a refining filter for experience is an artifact of language) Anyway, the Turing Test as a thought experiment isn't really a measure of intelligence so much as it is an economics model of an indifference curve, which is how much the observer cares (or not) about whether they are dealing with a machine. I'm actually more bullish on the possibility of AGI for some admittedly very strange reasons, even though I am harsh about people who anthropomorphisze code and fall for animism. My view reduces to a kind of theistic argument where if we can create conscious life from rude materials, it is logical evidence that we ourselves may also have been the expression of some similar intention. If AGI is demonstrably impossible within our physics (like incompleteness theorem level proof), then we exist within a hard ontological boundary, and the best we can do is infer what that boundary is made of (probably time/gravity). The reason I think AGI is plausible is because I have theistic axioms that create a kind of circular reference where if we can Create life, then we could also have been Created with the intent to discover and appreciate the meaning of that, and if we cannot Create, we were not meant to experience that Creation. Maybe even if there is something on the other side of death, we may still just be programs or epiphenomena that aren't intended to reflect or apprehend our substrate, sort of like the one-way directional relationship between an instrument and a song played on it. An AGI would make the leap from song, to software, to operating on its environment using abstraction, generalization and feedback. It wouldn't be "us," but I think it could certainly become a them that could eventually exist independently of us.