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Can intelligence be separated from the body?
- electric_mayhem 4y agoA Neal Stephenson book named “Fall; or Dodge in Hell” explores this idea a bit. It’s a worthwhile read.
- aschearer 4y agoTo what extent is our intelligence a consequence of our bodies, evolution? Would a computer have intuition? Fight or flight responses? As a species, we're still debating which mammals are "intelligent" and they share most of our circuitry and evolutionary history. Will we be able to recognize "intelligence" in another form? Or flipping it around, will it recognize our intelligence? Or will it see us much like we see a chimpanzee colony?
- yreg 4y agoWhy shouldn't it be possible to simulate a full human mind, say, at atomic level? What does the intelligence/consciousness need that's impossible to simulate in software? I can't think of many reasons, besides perhaps true randomness?
- notahacker 4y ago> Why shouldn't it be possible to simulate a full human mind, say, at atomic level? Who's designing and running the simulation, on what infrastructure?
- burnished 4y agoIts a thought experiment, so whatever is required. Need a dyson sphere using a stars total energetic output for calculations? Need to network that? Fine, thats an engineering problem.
- notahacker 4y agoBut in this case "whatever is required" to build an atomic level simulation is the ability to observe and understand the simultaneous state changes of an octillion atoms well enough to write an emulation of them in some other medium (which is arguably a "body" of sorts anyway). That seems like less of an engineering problem and more of a "do you believe in gods?" problem.
- yreg 4y agoYes, being able to observe a brain to the same depth as the simulation is assumed.
- notahacker 4y agoNot just non-destructive real time observation, but also understanding patterns in observed state changes sufficiently well to be able to create lossless abstract representations of them in another medium. All seven octillion of them, operating in continuous time. There are information theoretic reasons to suspect the human mind can't parse itself in sufficient detail to write that program, but even without these I feel the rhetorical framing "why should it be possible?" makes more sense than "why shouldn't it". At least with "why shouldn't my dog be capable of understanding this HN exchange?" we've got evidence that mammals can learn that in our favour, and the step change between understanding "walkies" and thought experiments about hypothetical brain emulations is probably smaller than that between spotting which brain excites the EEG scanner more and atomic-level brain emulation.
- yreg 4y agoThis is not the point though. I'm not discussing whether we, humans can create such a simulation. It is a thought experiment of what we think such a simulated mind would be like and whether it would have intelligence/self-awareness/consciousness/experience qualia/etc. The topic is whether there is anything fundamentally important about the human wetware which couldn't be substituted by a computer.
- 4y ago
- mxkopy 4y agoI think you would end up simulating a childhood, society, cultural history, etc, - basically a human world - if you want to develop a human intelligence. I feel like this is an even harder problem than simulating a brain by itself.
- burnished 4y ago>To what extent is our intelligence a consequence of our bodies, evolution? Entirely? We're meat machines. >Would a computer have intuition? Fight or flight responses? If your grandmother had wheels would she be a bicycle?
- majkinetor 4y agoYeah, if it walks like a duck ...
- deesep 4y agoCars have wheels. They aren't bicycles. If all grandma does is function like a bicycle, then she is essentially a bicycle made of meat.
- dingusdew 4y agoAI has a body, it's just not the type of body we think of when we think of "body." AI can have many sensors that allow it to "see/hear/feel" outside of itself. AI is generally limited to its own system and requires a great deal of processing power, so it cannot easily "jump to a new body" as many people worry that a rogue AI will "find its way on to the internet." Fairly sure it would be useless for it to try to shack up on small low-power slow-CPU devices. AI has a body, and physical limitations, because computers are not fucking ethereal. They have physical locations, even when they are "virtual machines," they still live on physical hardware. When you take a drill to a hard drive, you are physically destroying data. Data is real.
- ttpphd 4y agoIs the AI in the room with us now?
- IIAOPSW 4y agoThe AI is always looking down on us from the cloud.
- majkinetor 4y agoNot down on those in the air gapped rooms...
- burnished 4y agoHuh, you've got an interesting observation there - I hadn't considered notional agents to be embodied because the specific location the code runs just isnt that important, but if we were to posit self aware artificial agents they might have a unifying perspective rooted in the practicalities of computer and network hardware. "If you flip my bits such that error correction cannot detect, does my data not corrupt?" sort of thing.
- majkinetor 4y agoBut the AI can transmit from good enough computer A to good enough computer B. We will make it that way eventually. But we will make us that way eventually too, via full body transplant or something like Altered Carbon. So no big difference indeed. Its just technology level for different entities. People are scared of AI, I would be basically equally scared if some psycopath can achive such transendence.
- paulsutter 4y agoAsk Stephen Hawking
- jamesgreenleaf 4y agoWhen we have the technology to extend or replace our own neurons with artificial ones, then we can start to answer these questions. Rebuild your ship and find out if you're still Theseus.
- karaterobot 4y ago> Boyuan Chen, a roboticist at Duke University who is working on developing intelligent robots, pointed out that the human mind — or any other animal mind, for that matter — is inextricable from the body’s actions in and reactions to the real world, shaped over millions of years of evolution. I'm a little surprised to learn that some people believe intelligence can be separated from the body. Intelligence didn't develop in a vacuum, then get poured into the body — it developed both evolutionary and in the case of you personally as a result of being a body in the world. It isn't something you can separate from our senses, or the physical world we inhabit. Anything else feels like mind-body dualism to me. That, or a science fiction model of the brain as being functionally like a squishy computer chip, just waiting to have programs uploaded into it.
- colordrops 4y agoMaybe not intelligence with conceptual capabilities but what about direct experiencing or witnessing? For every one of us, animal or human, we start primarily as an experiencer of reality, then as we grow we build a model of the physical world and how we relate to it. But that "subjective" experience is primary, and our model of reality, materialist or otherwise, is conceptual and inferred and secondary, including the idea that our firsthand experience and bodies are one in the same.
- RA_Fisher 4y agoThings like AutoGPT and BabyAGI seem intelligent to me. Intelligence is defined as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. How could it be denied that things like AutoGPT can acquire knowledge and apply skills?
- sicromoft 4y agohttps://archive.is/v5LjK https://archive.is/v5LjK
- pelorat 4y agoAwareness of self and of your own mind doesn't require a body, nor feelings for that matter. Human intelligence is actually limited by evolution and our meat bodies. It's quite evident that it's possible to engineer a mind more intelligent than evolution can ever hope to produce. Evolutionary intelligence is limited by biology.
- frogperson 4y agoI don't think intelligence can be separated from a body. Intelligent beings exist to fight entropy. They have a body that feels things like pain, pleasure, and hunger which lead to actions that minimize or maximize those feelings. ChatGPT and the like, might have senses like sight or hearing, but those systems are not acting on any kind of self preservation basis. They arent fighting entropy to exist. Once the machines feel hunger, fear, pain and so on and can use their learned knowledge to act in their own self interest then I think we can call them intelligent. I feel like a "body" of somekind is a requirement for pain and pleasure, but who knows? Im certainly not willing to make any predictions.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoI prefer subtractive models when discussing this topic as it leads to faster conclusions. What's the minimum number of sensory disablements a person could undergo before they were unable to be intelligent? If the question is absurd, it's precisely because the framing it operates - the embodiment dilemma - is ill-posed.
- pessimizer 4y agoThe question doesn't make much sense. A body is a ton of inputs and a ton of outputs, and some processing in the middle. You can separate the processing, but that would be as pointless as raising a brain in a tank from infancy. The process of training modern AI is basically simulating a body for an algorithm, except the feedback models get isn't as consistent as physics is, so legacy intelligence has an advantage. Models learning how to draw from physical metaphors would strengthen their language ability through analogy; imo understanding a thing moving through space and time is the primary thing public examples haven't completely figured out.
- villgax 4y agoI feel like intelligent beings can be raised regardless of language, sight, hearing, voice or a combination thereof. The guardrails to not die in the first few development years(epochs) is what carries us humans into adulthood with job specific specialist education
- samstave 4y agoWell, if politics is any measure, then clearly the answer is yes.
- thro1 4y agoIntelligent intelligence is encoded in DNA ("so many knobs"): becoming, experiencing, learning, seeing, for some walking just from birth. Being sentient and conscious for sure help a lot, it took quite time too - but why the medium (the best I can imagine BTW) shall be the limit ? Good luck!
- jarchamb 4y agoIntelligence is the capacity to direct our behavior in the face of external circumstances and events. The more it integrates rational thinking, emotions, intuitions and acquired knowledge, the more we are intelligent. This is all contained into the workings of the brain. Even the "extended" cognition is only using previously created artifacts to enhance our memory, the same as we use books. As for identity, it is perceived from inside as we build a model of ourselves. We test our thoughts with feedback we gather. Our identity evolves with experience and incidents. The systemic identity of an individual is its uniqueness in the collective, and is observed from the behavior of the individual in selective circumstances. Nobody ever discovers the entirety of the identity, which only exists at the boundary between inside and outside, that is not observable from either points of view.