5 ms·

> 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

> 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 ago
Maybe 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 ago
Things 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?
- jutrewag 4y ago
  Not sure why you’re talking about side projects like AutoGPT when you could be referencing chatGPT/GPT4 with the same arguments you’re making.
  - RA_Fisher 4y ago
    I don’t think the same is as true of LLMs unless they’re put into a system (that can acquire knowledge and skills).
ravi-delia 4y ago
The problem is that it's absolutely something you can sever from specific senses or specific parts of your body. If I were to go blind, I suspect I would be the same person afterward (or at least no more different than I would be had I retained my sight). If I lost an arm, I'd still be me, just a me controlling one less arm. I guess my point is that if intelligence is really inseparable from the body, you'd expect that it would be impossible to keep a head alive without a body- not for any biological reasons, but because the patient would become abruptly...well I'd like to say braindead but apparently there's some other source of intelligence. And you can debate about whether a sci-fi "upload" of your brain is still you, but if you're going to say it wouldn't be able to think at all then you're the one proposing mind-body dualism. edit: Of course the obvious counterargument is that plenty of people get minor to moderate brain damage while plausibly remaining the same person. I don't think I'm willing to bite that bullet, so my best pitch is that "me" is as made up a category as every other, so we should expect some weirdness.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > you'd expect that it would be impossible to keep a head alive without a body Is the head not part of the body? Here's an interesting reality -- there is no hard dividing line between where the brain stops and the rest of the body starts. It's a bit like trying to say where the atmosphere stops and space begins. And we have neural masses around the heart and stomach that engage in independent activity. Some neuroscientists argue that it's reasonable to say we have three brains.
  - ravi-delia 4y ago
    I'm afraid there's actually a fairly firm line. The neural masses around the gut (and to a much lesser extent heart) are entirely different in structure from the cerebral grey matter we know we think with. It is however consistent with the rest of the peripheral nervous system, because that's what it's a part of. Many of the neurons in the gut are simply sensory neurons doing no processing, and the rest aren't far from what you'd expect to coordinate the various systems. That's why even though every area of the brain has a cognitive deficit associated with its removal, there is nothing similar for the gut or heart (besides the obvious issues). Mere neurons do not a brain make.
version_five 4y ago
I don't belive weren't closer to sentient intelligence than we were when babylonians started counting on tablets. But it seems pretty intuitive that intelligence can exist outside the body. If you suddenly lost your body and had your brain in a computer that could receive audio and video input, couldn't you still act? What if you had no senses and just had info fed into your mind for reflection? I understand the idea of "embodied intelligence" and that sensory awareness is a big part of our intelligence, but I don't see why it would need to be mandatory to be intelligent.
- noiv 4y ago
  Three thoughts: first people in hospitals constraint to mostly their bed loose IQ points by the day lacking physical interactions, second I'd assume it's about developing intelligence and third I can easily imagine the Internet and its technical restrictions plus its users and their behaviour as some kind of body, useful to let a AI train itself on and achieve goals. But actually I fear the possible outcomes.
- bitwize 4y ago
  > What if you had no senses and just had info fed into your mind for reflection? Metallica - One.mp3 Serious answer: you'd hallucinate like crazy. A brain deprived of sensory information starts generating its own. Over long enough periods of time, like the protagonist of "One" you might go mad and wish for someone to end it all.
hackinthebochs 4y ago
The key is to figure out what features of our history are critical and which are accidental when it comes to intelligence. Seeing as our access to the outside world, and even our own body, is mediated by way of electrical impulses that conceptually come apart from our body suggests that embodiment is not crucial.
foobarian 4y ago
The most interesting phenomena tied to this to me are various unconscious/semi-conscious states like sleep or anesthesia. Clearly we have the ability to induce these using simple chemicals. Also from medical data we know what happens when brains are damaged or altered.
Veedrac 4y ago
Counting also also didn't develop in a vacuum, then get poured into the body; counting was developed equally evolutionarily and equally in response to physical interactions of a person to the world. But as photosynthesis works too outside the cell, provided exterior force and the motive to produce it there when the bio-evolutionary one is taken away, so too are algorithms a real thing that have real properties distinct and separable from the mysterious vital energies that housed their evolution.
bitwize 4y ago
I remember a Hackernews wondering if people who were "born paralyzed" might have intellectual disabilities as well, and the answer appears to be yes. One of the things that came out of Papert's Logo research was the benefits to kids with severe motor disabilities: by setting things up so they could drive the turtle around, they had much better grasp of spatial relations between objects than they otherwise would. Being able to manipulate a proxy in the real world (the turtle) allowed them to explore those spatial relations in ways they couldn't with their physical bodies and that's critical to our cognitive development.
hosh 4y ago
There's this fun little article here proposing the spider web as an external extension of intelligence for the spider: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-thoughts-of-a-spiderweb-20170523/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-thoughts-of-a-spiderweb-2... I think it's worth distinguishing intelligence from consciousness (and sentience).
jutrewag 4y ago
Well that’s like saying a model needs all kinds of inputs and training data but once it is trained it’s not portable. That’s just not true. Post training the intelligence is separable.
olalonde 4y ago
> Anything else feels like mind-body dualism to me. It seems you misunderstand what "mind-body dualism" means then. Mind-body dualism is basically a supernatural belief that the mind exists independent of physical reality. For example, dualists believe that an AI, which is based on physical computing systems, can never possess a mind. Believing that intelligence can arise from a physical process (e.g. a computer chip) is the opposite of that. It's unclear to me whether you actually subscribe to the dualist view but someone who believes that intelligence can arise from a computer chip does not.
- goatlover 4y ago
  Not necessarily, because functionalism where the substrate doesn’t matter can be viewed as a form of dualism. Particularly if we’re talking about animal intelligence and mind uploads. You can see the more extreme forms of this sort of dualism in sci-fi when minds are swapped between bodies, or someone’s mind is transferred to a computer or robot. Also, dualism doesn’t require supernaturalism. It just requires there be more than one kind of fundamental stuff. There’s no logical principle saying nature has to be only one kind of substance or process. Many modern philosophers who are dualists are also naturalists. Chalmers for example, is a property dualist regarding conscious states (qualia). Also, one can be a neutral monist, believing that mind and matter emerge for a neutral substance that is neither. Maybe a Kantian would defend something like that? Anyway, philosophy has many options regarding dualism, mind and matter which aren't supernatural. You can even be an idealist and a naturalist. You just think the physical world is material ideas in minds.
  - olalonde 4y ago
    It seems you are using "dualism" to mean something else than what it means in the "mind-body dualism" context. The "dualism" in mind-body dualism is supernatural by definition. It's a claim that there exists something beyond nature ("supernatural") that exists and explains the mind. It's essentially a religious belief with no scientific basis. Dualists do not generally believe that AI is possible because they claim it would be missing this "supernatural" property which human minds possess.
hulitu 4y ago
> I'm a little surprised to learn that some people believe intelligence can be separated from the body. Just look at politicians for examples. /s
Tozen 4y ago
As technology progresses, it will probably be possible to scan human brains and make digital copies. With the digital copies, and further study, at some point humans will likely fully decode and know exactly how brains work. At that point, there isn't any magic or mystery. You can create androids who are as equally intelligent as humans. Maybe we will place some limits or restrictions on them, as safeguards, but no telling how that will work out as time goes by. We might not be too far away from such a day, relatively speaking. Maybe it will take another 25 to 50 years. But it looks like we will get there, if we don't self destruct before then via nuclear war or some other catastrophe.
rrgok 4y ago
I don't know if intelligence can be separated from the physical body, or the other way around. Maybe the body emerged out of intelligence. Like nails emerges form the skin, so is the physical body. Maybe it took millions of year of evolution for that intelligence to build a physical body capable of sustaining and expressing itself. Maybe it is not yet done. Just a thought experiment.
FrontierPsych 4y ago
Do you have any proof that it can't be done? Because otherwise you are making an opinion. It's like saying that people can't fly. Maybe we cannot do it with wings, but we do it nonetheless. But we have only started this age of more and more knowledge over the last 100-150 years, and it is logarithmic and the curve is getting steeper and steeper with each year. Who knows what will be possible in another 150 years? As far as I'm concerned, I'm 100% convinced that by 2050, you'll be able to put your brain on a chip and we will use robots and inhabit robot bodies to travel around, just download our program into the robot's body.

colordrops 4y ago

Maybe 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 ago

Things 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?

jutrewag 4y ago
Not sure why you’re talking about side projects like AutoGPT when you could be referencing chatGPT/GPT4 with the same arguments you’re making.
- RA_Fisher 4y ago
  I don’t think the same is as true of LLMs unless they’re put into a system (that can acquire knowledge and skills).

ravi-delia 4y ago

The problem is that it's absolutely something you can sever from specific senses or specific parts of your body. If I were to go blind, I suspect I would be the same person afterward (or at least no more different than I would be had I retained my sight). If I lost an arm, I'd still be me, just a me controlling one less arm. I guess my point is that if intelligence is really inseparable from the body, you'd expect that it would be impossible to keep a head alive without a body- not for any biological reasons, but because the patient would become abruptly...well I'd like to say braindead but apparently there's some other source of intelligence. And you can debate about whether a sci-fi "upload" of your brain is still you, but if you're going to say it wouldn't be able to think at all then you're the one proposing mind-body dualism. edit: Of course the obvious counterargument is that plenty of people get minor to moderate brain damage while plausibly remaining the same person. I don't think I'm willing to bite that bullet, so my best pitch is that "me" is as made up a category as every other, so we should expect some weirdness.

JohnFen 4y ago
> you'd expect that it would be impossible to keep a head alive without a body Is the head not part of the body? Here's an interesting reality -- there is no hard dividing line between where the brain stops and the rest of the body starts. It's a bit like trying to say where the atmosphere stops and space begins. And we have neural masses around the heart and stomach that engage in independent activity. Some neuroscientists argue that it's reasonable to say we have three brains.
- ravi-delia 4y ago
  I'm afraid there's actually a fairly firm line. The neural masses around the gut (and to a much lesser extent heart) are entirely different in structure from the cerebral grey matter we know we think with. It is however consistent with the rest of the peripheral nervous system, because that's what it's a part of. Many of the neurons in the gut are simply sensory neurons doing no processing, and the rest aren't far from what you'd expect to coordinate the various systems. That's why even though every area of the brain has a cognitive deficit associated with its removal, there is nothing similar for the gut or heart (besides the obvious issues). Mere neurons do not a brain make.

version_five 4y ago

I don't belive weren't closer to sentient intelligence than we were when babylonians started counting on tablets. But it seems pretty intuitive that intelligence can exist outside the body. If you suddenly lost your body and had your brain in a computer that could receive audio and video input, couldn't you still act? What if you had no senses and just had info fed into your mind for reflection? I understand the idea of "embodied intelligence" and that sensory awareness is a big part of our intelligence, but I don't see why it would need to be mandatory to be intelligent.

noiv 4y ago
Three thoughts: first people in hospitals constraint to mostly their bed loose IQ points by the day lacking physical interactions, second I'd assume it's about developing intelligence and third I can easily imagine the Internet and its technical restrictions plus its users and their behaviour as some kind of body, useful to let a AI train itself on and achieve goals. But actually I fear the possible outcomes.
bitwize 4y ago
> What if you had no senses and just had info fed into your mind for reflection? Metallica - One.mp3 Serious answer: you'd hallucinate like crazy. A brain deprived of sensory information starts generating its own. Over long enough periods of time, like the protagonist of "One" you might go mad and wish for someone to end it all.

hackinthebochs 4y ago

The key is to figure out what features of our history are critical and which are accidental when it comes to intelligence. Seeing as our access to the outside world, and even our own body, is mediated by way of electrical impulses that conceptually come apart from our body suggests that embodiment is not crucial.

foobarian 4y ago

The most interesting phenomena tied to this to me are various unconscious/semi-conscious states like sleep or anesthesia. Clearly we have the ability to induce these using simple chemicals. Also from medical data we know what happens when brains are damaged or altered.

Veedrac 4y ago

Counting also also didn't develop in a vacuum, then get poured into the body; counting was developed equally evolutionarily and equally in response to physical interactions of a person to the world. But as photosynthesis works too outside the cell, provided exterior force and the motive to produce it there when the bio-evolutionary one is taken away, so too are algorithms a real thing that have real properties distinct and separable from the mysterious vital energies that housed their evolution.

bitwize 4y ago

I remember a Hackernews wondering if people who were "born paralyzed" might have intellectual disabilities as well, and the answer appears to be yes. One of the things that came out of Papert's Logo research was the benefits to kids with severe motor disabilities: by setting things up so they could drive the turtle around, they had much better grasp of spatial relations between objects than they otherwise would. Being able to manipulate a proxy in the real world (the turtle) allowed them to explore those spatial relations in ways they couldn't with their physical bodies and that's critical to our cognitive development.

hosh 4y ago

There's this fun little article here proposing the spider web as an external extension of intelligence for the spider: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-thoughts-of-a-spiderweb-20170523/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-thoughts-of-a-spiderweb-2... I think it's worth distinguishing intelligence from consciousness (and sentience).

jutrewag 4y ago

Well that’s like saying a model needs all kinds of inputs and training data but once it is trained it’s not portable. That’s just not true. Post training the intelligence is separable.

olalonde 4y ago

> Anything else feels like mind-body dualism to me. It seems you misunderstand what "mind-body dualism" means then. Mind-body dualism is basically a supernatural belief that the mind exists independent of physical reality. For example, dualists believe that an AI, which is based on physical computing systems, can never possess a mind. Believing that intelligence can arise from a physical process (e.g. a computer chip) is the opposite of that. It's unclear to me whether you actually subscribe to the dualist view but someone who believes that intelligence can arise from a computer chip does not.

goatlover 4y ago
Not necessarily, because functionalism where the substrate doesn’t matter can be viewed as a form of dualism. Particularly if we’re talking about animal intelligence and mind uploads. You can see the more extreme forms of this sort of dualism in sci-fi when minds are swapped between bodies, or someone’s mind is transferred to a computer or robot. Also, dualism doesn’t require supernaturalism. It just requires there be more than one kind of fundamental stuff. There’s no logical principle saying nature has to be only one kind of substance or process. Many modern philosophers who are dualists are also naturalists. Chalmers for example, is a property dualist regarding conscious states (qualia). Also, one can be a neutral monist, believing that mind and matter emerge for a neutral substance that is neither. Maybe a Kantian would defend something like that? Anyway, philosophy has many options regarding dualism, mind and matter which aren't supernatural. You can even be an idealist and a naturalist. You just think the physical world is material ideas in minds.
- olalonde 4y ago
  It seems you are using "dualism" to mean something else than what it means in the "mind-body dualism" context. The "dualism" in mind-body dualism is supernatural by definition. It's a claim that there exists something beyond nature ("supernatural") that exists and explains the mind. It's essentially a religious belief with no scientific basis. Dualists do not generally believe that AI is possible because they claim it would be missing this "supernatural" property which human minds possess.

hulitu 4y ago

> I'm a little surprised to learn that some people believe intelligence can be separated from the body. Just look at politicians for examples. /s

Tozen 4y ago

As technology progresses, it will probably be possible to scan human brains and make digital copies. With the digital copies, and further study, at some point humans will likely fully decode and know exactly how brains work. At that point, there isn't any magic or mystery. You can create androids who are as equally intelligent as humans. Maybe we will place some limits or restrictions on them, as safeguards, but no telling how that will work out as time goes by. We might not be too far away from such a day, relatively speaking. Maybe it will take another 25 to 50 years. But it looks like we will get there, if we don't self destruct before then via nuclear war or some other catastrophe.

rrgok 4y ago

I don't know if intelligence can be separated from the physical body, or the other way around. Maybe the body emerged out of intelligence. Like nails emerges form the skin, so is the physical body. Maybe it took millions of year of evolution for that intelligence to build a physical body capable of sustaining and expressing itself. Maybe it is not yet done. Just a thought experiment.

FrontierPsych 4y ago

Do you have any proof that it can't be done? Because otherwise you are making an opinion. It's like saying that people can't fly. Maybe we cannot do it with wings, but we do it nonetheless. But we have only started this age of more and more knowledge over the last 100-150 years, and it is logarithmic and the curve is getting steeper and steeper with each year. Who knows what will be possible in another 150 years? As far as I'm concerned, I'm 100% convinced that by 2050, you'll be able to put your brain on a chip and we will use robots and inhabit robot bodies to travel around, just download our program into the robot's body.