8 ms·

How do you arrive at the statement that a cavemen would have the same intelligence as a human today? Intelligence is surely not usually defined as the cognitive

by mhl47 6mo ago

How do you arrive at the statement that a cavemen would have the same intelligence as a human today? Intelligence is surely not usually defined as the cognitive potential at birth but as the current capability. And the knowledge an average human has today through education surely factors into that.

Planktonne 6mo ago
Knowledge is a thing you can use intelligence on, but not a component of intelligence itself.
- paganel 6mo ago
  Separating knowledge from intelligence is not a given.
  - Jensson 6mo ago
    You can give an intelligent being knowledge but you can't give a book intelligence. So I think its easy to separate knowledge from intelligence.
    - cess11 6mo ago
      The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me. I consider the act of knowing to be embodied, it is something a person has learned to do and has control over. Is that how you approach PDF files? Do you feel it in your bones that these flows of bytes are knowing?
      - Jensson 6mo ago
        > The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me I didn't say the book knows things, but everyone can agree that books has knowledge in them. Hence something possessing knowledge doesn't make it intelligent. For example, when ancient libraries were burnt those civilizations lost a lot of knowledge. Those books possessed knowledge, it isn't a hard concept to understand. Those civilizations didn't lose intelligence, the smart humans were still there, they just lost knowledge.
        TeMPOraL 6mo ago
        Would you consider taking a dump and then butchering an animal and then eating without washing your hands first, to be an issue of intelligence or knowledge? The whole thing about washing hands comes from (some approximation of) germ theory of illness, and in practice, it actually just boils down to stories of other people practicing hygiene. So if one's answer here isn't "knowledge", it needs some serious justification. Expanding that: can you think of things that are "intelligence" that cannot be reduced like this to knowledge (or combination of knowledge + social expectations)? I think in some sense, separating knowledge and intelligence is as dumb a confusion of ideas as separating "code" and "data" (doesn't stop half the industry from believing them to be distinct thing). But I'm willing to agree that hardware-wise, humans today and those from 10 000 years ago, are roughly the same, so if you teleported an infant from 8000 BC to this day, they'd learn to function in our times without a problem. Adults are another thing, brains aren't CPUs, the distinction between software and hardware isn't as clear in vivo as it is in silico, due to properties of the computational medium.
        NooneAtAll3 6mo ago
        hygiene is set of rules that one learns - it is knowledge your brain hearing, comprehending and following those rules - that is intelligence why do you keep confusing CPU speed/isa and contents of SSD? and arguing that it's the same thing?
        paganel 6mo ago
        Because comparing the human brain and the way it is thinking and seeing and interacting to/with the world to physical/mechanical things like CPU/SSD brings with it huge abstraction gaps, to the point of making the comparison null.
        NooneAtAll3 6mo ago
        except we aren't talking about internals of the brain - we are talking about definitions of the words, which are very different
- mhl47 6mo ago
  The knowledge that everything is made out of atoms/molecules however makes it much easier to reason about your environment. And based on this knowledge you also learn algorithms, how to solve problems etc. I dont think its possible to completely separate knowledge from intelligence.
  - Jensson 6mo ago
    But an intelligent being could learn that, do you think they become more intelligent if you tell them things are made out of atoms? To me the answer is very simple, no they don't become more intelligent.
    - Gud 6mo ago
      Yes, intelligence can be influenced by training(and other things).
    - Bewelge 6mo ago
      Would you also say that you cannot "train" intelligence? I would agree that generally, purely acquiring knowledge does not increase intelligence. But I would also argue that intelligence (ie your raw "processing power") can be trained, a bit like a muscle. And acquiring and processing new knowledge is one of the main ways we train that "muscle". There's lots of examples where your definition of intelligence (intelligence == raw processing power) either doesn't make sense, or is so narrow that it becomes a meaningless concept. Let's consider feral children (ie humans growing up among animals with no human contact). Apparently they are unable or have trouble learning a human language. There's a theory that there's a critical period after which we are unable to learn certain things. Wouldn't the "ability to learn a language" be considered intelligence? Would you therefore consider a young child more intelligent than any adult? And to answer your question, whether learning about atoms makes you more intelligent: Yes, probably. It will create some kind of connections in your brain that didn't exist before. It's a piece of knowledge that can be drawn upon for all of your thinking and it's a piece of knowledge that most humans would not figure out on their own. By basically any sensible definition of intelligence, yes it does improve your intelligence.
technothrasher 6mo ago
Your attempt to commingle intelligence and knowledge is not needed to support your initial question. The original statement that a caveman 200K years ago would have the same intelligence as a modern human was blankly asserted without any supporting evidence, and so it is valid to simply question the claim. You do not need to give a counterclaim, as that is unnecessarily shifting the burden of proof.
wang_li 6mo ago
It's even sillier than that. You can look at populations in the modern world and see there are huge differences in intelligence due to various factors such as cousin marriage and nutrition.
darkwater 6mo ago
I think the core idea is that if a baby with "caveman genetics" so to speak were to be born today, they could achieve similar intellectual results to the (average?) rest of the population. At least that's how I interpret it.

by mhl47 6mo ago

Planktonne 6mo ago

Knowledge is a thing you can use intelligence on, but not a component of intelligence itself.

paganel 6mo ago
Separating knowledge from intelligence is not a given.
- Jensson 6mo ago
  You can give an intelligent being knowledge but you can't give a book intelligence. So I think its easy to separate knowledge from intelligence.
  - cess11 6mo ago
    The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me. I consider the act of knowing to be embodied, it is something a person has learned to do and has control over. Is that how you approach PDF files? Do you feel it in your bones that these flows of bytes are knowing?
    - Jensson 6mo ago
      > The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me I didn't say the book knows things, but everyone can agree that books has knowledge in them. Hence something possessing knowledge doesn't make it intelligent. For example, when ancient libraries were burnt those civilizations lost a lot of knowledge. Those books possessed knowledge, it isn't a hard concept to understand. Those civilizations didn't lose intelligence, the smart humans were still there, they just lost knowledge.
      - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
        Would you consider taking a dump and then butchering an animal and then eating without washing your hands first, to be an issue of intelligence or knowledge? The whole thing about washing hands comes from (some approximation of) germ theory of illness, and in practice, it actually just boils down to stories of other people practicing hygiene. So if one's answer here isn't "knowledge", it needs some serious justification. Expanding that: can you think of things that are "intelligence" that cannot be reduced like this to knowledge (or combination of knowledge + social expectations)? I think in some sense, separating knowledge and intelligence is as dumb a confusion of ideas as separating "code" and "data" (doesn't stop half the industry from believing them to be distinct thing). But I'm willing to agree that hardware-wise, humans today and those from 10 000 years ago, are roughly the same, so if you teleported an infant from 8000 BC to this day, they'd learn to function in our times without a problem. Adults are another thing, brains aren't CPUs, the distinction between software and hardware isn't as clear in vivo as it is in silico, due to properties of the computational medium.
        NooneAtAll3 6mo ago
        hygiene is set of rules that one learns - it is knowledge your brain hearing, comprehending and following those rules - that is intelligence why do you keep confusing CPU speed/isa and contents of SSD? and arguing that it's the same thing?
        paganel 6mo ago
        Because comparing the human brain and the way it is thinking and seeing and interacting to/with the world to physical/mechanical things like CPU/SSD brings with it huge abstraction gaps, to the point of making the comparison null.
        NooneAtAll3 6mo ago
        except we aren't talking about internals of the brain - we are talking about definitions of the words, which are very different
mhl47 6mo ago
The knowledge that everything is made out of atoms/molecules however makes it much easier to reason about your environment. And based on this knowledge you also learn algorithms, how to solve problems etc. I dont think its possible to completely separate knowledge from intelligence.
- Jensson 6mo ago
  But an intelligent being could learn that, do you think they become more intelligent if you tell them things are made out of atoms? To me the answer is very simple, no they don't become more intelligent.
  - Gud 6mo ago
    Yes, intelligence can be influenced by training(and other things).
  - Bewelge 6mo ago
    Would you also say that you cannot "train" intelligence? I would agree that generally, purely acquiring knowledge does not increase intelligence. But I would also argue that intelligence (ie your raw "processing power") can be trained, a bit like a muscle. And acquiring and processing new knowledge is one of the main ways we train that "muscle". There's lots of examples where your definition of intelligence (intelligence == raw processing power) either doesn't make sense, or is so narrow that it becomes a meaningless concept. Let's consider feral children (ie humans growing up among animals with no human contact). Apparently they are unable or have trouble learning a human language. There's a theory that there's a critical period after which we are unable to learn certain things. Wouldn't the "ability to learn a language" be considered intelligence? Would you therefore consider a young child more intelligent than any adult? And to answer your question, whether learning about atoms makes you more intelligent: Yes, probably. It will create some kind of connections in your brain that didn't exist before. It's a piece of knowledge that can be drawn upon for all of your thinking and it's a piece of knowledge that most humans would not figure out on their own. By basically any sensible definition of intelligence, yes it does improve your intelligence.

technothrasher 6mo ago

Your attempt to commingle intelligence and knowledge is not needed to support your initial question. The original statement that a caveman 200K years ago would have the same intelligence as a modern human was blankly asserted without any supporting evidence, and so it is valid to simply question the claim. You do not need to give a counterclaim, as that is unnecessarily shifting the burden of proof.

wang_li 6mo ago

It's even sillier than that. You can look at populations in the modern world and see there are huge differences in intelligence due to various factors such as cousin marriage and nutrition.

darkwater 6mo ago

I think the core idea is that if a baby with "caveman genetics" so to speak were to be born today, they could achieve similar intellectual results to the (average?) rest of the population. At least that's how I interpret it.