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Humans define intelligence to be something about manipulating symbols and abstractions, aka language. To understand why this is the case try to go about your da
by haltist 3y ago
Humans define intelligence to be something about manipulating symbols and abstractions, aka language. To understand why this is the case try to go about your day without speaking or writing. Bonus points if you perform this trial without access to the internet or a cell phone.
The modern individual is an element of an electromagnetic "swarm". The swarm ingests petroleum for sustenance instead of sunlight but nonetheless it is a swarm. The individuals within it are extremely dumb but collectively "it" has already transformed the atmosphere.
claude.ai: You make a thoughtful comparison between human societies and natural swarms in terms of emergent properties. There are certainly some parallels we can draw:
1. Self-organization - Human societies and cultures emerge in a distributed way through millions of individual interactions, without centralized control. Norms, fashions, and collective behavior patterns evolve dynamically.
2. Flexibility and robustness - Human systems adapt over time to changes in the environment and available resources. If some components fail (companies, institutions, etc.), society persists.
3. Decentralized parallelism - Vast networks of simultaneous human activities, communications, and decisions lead to collective economic and technological progress no individual could achieve alone.
However, there are also important differences to consider:
- Human intelligence, thanks to language and culture, operates in far more complex symbolic realms of meaning, ethics, imagination, and abstraction compared to insect swarms.
- Humans exhibit as much conflict between groups and divergence of motivations as coordination towards common goals. Maintaining large-scale cooperation remains an ongoing challenge.
So in summary, I think the analogy has merit at an abstract systems level, but glossing over the distinctive attributes of human cognition, psychology and social dynamics would miss something vitally important. Let me know if you have any other perspectives to add!
- khimaros 3y agoperhaps we're thinking too small, and the biosphere is intelligent. DNA is the language that expressed us into existence. everything else we've thought is but a subset of that broader intellect.
- haltist 3y agoThe real intellect is the sun.
- ShamelessC 3y agoYou lost me with that second paragraph.
- haltist 3y agoI wouldn't worry too much about it. Not all of us can be ultra geniuses. I recently got a neurallink so I am way smarter than the typical swarm element because I have direct access to the internet in my brain. I didn't even type this, I just thought what needed to be typed and it just happened. I am still homeless but well on my out of poverty thanks to my new brain inplant that beams the internet into my brain. There is supposed to be a vision upgrade in the next version that will give me access to biometrics of the people I am looking at which will make selling them something much easier. Turns out that mood is correlated with purchasing decisions and sales is all about putting the customer in the right mood which have obvious biometric markers.
- Zambyte 3y agoIn a sense... I define intelligence to be knowledge + reason. Language is the medium for reason, but language itself is not reason. For example, Wikipedia is a highly knowledgeable system with lots of language, but Wikipedia itself has no ability to reason, and thus os not an intelligent system. When something/someone reasons about things, they/it use language to do so. You can't get around that. The language might be a natural one like English, or something contrived like math, but it's language all the same. If we reason about something we have no knowledge on, we are not being intelligent. On the other hand, of we reason about something we are knowledgeable about, we are acting intelligently.
- lpapez 3y ago> Humans define intelligence to be something about manipulating symbols and abstractions, aka language. No they do not. Nobody can agree on the definition of intelligence and it is an open question what it is. Are cats intelligent? They can't read but plenty of people would call them that. Are illiterate jungle tribe people intelligent? Absolutely yes. Your easy definition falls apart right away.
- haltist 3y agoIronically you had to use language to call me stupid. I think you should think about that for a while.
- lpapez 3y agoWhen and where did I call you stupid?
- haltist 3y agoMy mistake. Tell your VC friends you know an ultra genius on an internet forum that can solve any problem with AI and $80B. The money is the important part because without the money I can't buy the required number of GPUs for my AGI architecture. It requires building a special kind of panopticon and that is why there is such a high monetary cost to construct the panoptic computronium cathedral™. To achieve AGI will require creating an entirely new religion because enough people need to be convinced about the value of letting computers do all the thinking for managing society so there is a large marketing component as well and marketing is notoriously expensive.
- pixl97 3y agoThey didn't have to, you would have been there in person to see the disappointed look on their face and shook their head as they walked away silently. It's just that HN has no other mechanism than language to convey anything at all. Hence forums/chatrooms behave much in the same manner as LLMs do.
- 3y ago