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> Lossless compression is equivalent to intelligence. The article has all of the foundations to make a much more reasoned and perhaps more interesting claim: i

> Lossless compression is equivalent to intelligence. The article has all of the foundations to make a much more reasoned and perhaps more interesting claim: intelligence is equivalent to the size of one's abstraction inventory, and abstraction utility is measured by prediction success in abstraction-space. The fact is that humans' short term memory capacity[1], necessitates the hoisting of raw sense data into an abstract space, and doing so implies a very real lossy process. We don't really make much of a fuss when ontologizing the world, but it's a bit strange doing that specifically when referencing Hegel. The author is as guilty as anyone who, during the process of abstraction, forgets they have done so and thinks that the concept of a cat implies that cats are some universal essence made manifest. Forms are constantly trying to convince us that they're real. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...

rektide 4y ago
Hoisting and... And applying/recalling. Quite a lovely post, thank you, well constructed. One other theme that shows up (briefly) is that storing the data isn't good enough. Being able to access your compressed data, being able to apply yiur compressed models to new applications is, in my view, another core aspect of intelligence, one that requires & uses real ingenuity. Being a highly associative person is, IMO, a colossal form of intelligence & intellect.
voidhorse 4y ago
> The author is as guilty as anyone who, during the process of abstraction, forgets they have done so and thinks that the concept of a cat implies that cats are some universal essence made manifest. Forms are constantly trying to convince us that they're real. The later Marxists had a term for this, reification, and I'm convinced it is probably the most common fallacy human beings make.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Using the technical term has tended to enrage folks here before. "Why should I have to read The Social Construction of Reality to understand what you've written," has the same sensibility as "Why should I have to know a programing language to write programs?!" But yes, that's precisely it.
crabkin 4y ago
While I can empathize with these thoughts, I hear them from people who I think have brilliant ideas, like Karl Popper N.N. Taleb, something about this sort of definition of intelligence and the strictness of forms I think it implies rubs me as presumptive and confused as the claims its critiquing. For instance, what about the subconscious? The subconscious must play a strong role in problem solving and creativity, which is how I notice intelligence, anybody I think who has written a piece of music or struggled with a proof can attest to that. But are there abstractions at play when the unconscious is in the driver seat? And if the unconscious speaks in abstractions, are they the same "form" abstractions the conscious mind is so familiar with? Consider some different form of abstraction, informed by and tooled by information and methods you are not privy to. Moreover, if humans did have unlimited short term memory size, suppose we had to find what numbers are divisible by a prime, how many of us would be checking numbers individually in our head and not using Fermat's Little Theorem? Suppose such memory allows us to discover new methods of compaction, wait then, we are playing the same game again and perhaps that would lead us to the presumption that we do it because our working memory is not "good" enough. Then "intelligence," which we outside of ourselves can only perceive in the ways it is demonstrable, and what motivates it, seems less then about the journey to compact information into coherence, producing objects for an inventory and thereby producing some super-order of workshopping, and more about heuristic success in pragmatic material terms. These are terms I'd argue out of the scope of "conscious" abstraction, hence the rejection of such ideas/thoughts on account of their supposed duplicity. But I don't know if the same can be said for the unconscious. It seems to me then that so called compression, conscious abstraction, is more than an evolutionarily-devised-resource-scarcity-solution, it's baked in, *ontologically*. We are, in part, motivated to look for solutions not necessarily on account of our limitations but because we can imagine solutions. I do anticipate your eye roll. I would posit then, part of what is at play for what I'll term demonstrable intelligence, is the degree to which the conscious mind has strength in itself as an abstraction workstation and how much access the "unconscious" mind seems to grant it to other spheres of tooling. In this sense, not only is the success of abstractions and their varieties relevant, but those very attributes of the abstractions are informed by the diversity and complexity of a little something else. So sure, the map is not the territory and the cat is in my mind and not necessarily a reflection of the material reality, but I think we exaggerate the problems in abstractions/forms because we are unsatisfied with the whole enterprise of consciously accessing the territory in the first place.

rektide 4y ago

Hoisting and... And applying/recalling. Quite a lovely post, thank you, well constructed. One other theme that shows up (briefly) is that storing the data isn't good enough. Being able to access your compressed data, being able to apply yiur compressed models to new applications is, in my view, another core aspect of intelligence, one that requires & uses real ingenuity. Being a highly associative person is, IMO, a colossal form of intelligence & intellect.

voidhorse 4y ago

> The author is as guilty as anyone who, during the process of abstraction, forgets they have done so and thinks that the concept of a cat implies that cats are some universal essence made manifest. Forms are constantly trying to convince us that they're real. The later Marxists had a term for this, reification, and I'm convinced it is probably the most common fallacy human beings make.

kelseyfrog 4y ago
Using the technical term has tended to enrage folks here before. "Why should I have to read The Social Construction of Reality to understand what you've written," has the same sensibility as "Why should I have to know a programing language to write programs?!" But yes, that's precisely it.

crabkin 4y ago

While I can empathize with these thoughts, I hear them from people who I think have brilliant ideas, like Karl Popper N.N. Taleb, something about this sort of definition of intelligence and the strictness of forms I think it implies rubs me as presumptive and confused as the claims its critiquing. For instance, what about the subconscious? The subconscious must play a strong role in problem solving and creativity, which is how I notice intelligence, anybody I think who has written a piece of music or struggled with a proof can attest to that. But are there abstractions at play when the unconscious is in the driver seat? And if the unconscious speaks in abstractions, are they the same "form" abstractions the conscious mind is so familiar with? Consider some different form of abstraction, informed by and tooled by information and methods you are not privy to. Moreover, if humans did have unlimited short term memory size, suppose we had to find what numbers are divisible by a prime, how many of us would be checking numbers individually in our head and not using Fermat's Little Theorem? Suppose such memory allows us to discover new methods of compaction, wait then, we are playing the same game again and perhaps that would lead us to the presumption that we do it because our working memory is not "good" enough. Then "intelligence," which we outside of ourselves can only perceive in the ways it is demonstrable, and what motivates it, seems less then about the journey to compact information into coherence, producing objects for an inventory and thereby producing some super-order of workshopping, and more about heuristic success in pragmatic material terms. These are terms I'd argue out of the scope of "conscious" abstraction, hence the rejection of such ideas/thoughts on account of their supposed duplicity. But I don't know if the same can be said for the unconscious. It seems to me then that so called compression, conscious abstraction, is more than an evolutionarily-devised-resource-scarcity-solution, it's baked in, *ontologically*. We are, in part, motivated to look for solutions not necessarily on account of our limitations but because we can imagine solutions. I do anticipate your eye roll. I would posit then, part of what is at play for what I'll term demonstrable intelligence, is the degree to which the conscious mind has strength in itself as an abstraction workstation and how much access the "unconscious" mind seems to grant it to other spheres of tooling. In this sense, not only is the success of abstractions and their varieties relevant, but those very attributes of the abstractions are informed by the diversity and complexity of a little something else. So sure, the map is not the territory and the cat is in my mind and not necessarily a reflection of the material reality, but I think we exaggerate the problems in abstractions/forms because we are unsatisfied with the whole enterprise of consciously accessing the territory in the first place.