Difference between revisions of "Talk:The Origin of Thought"

Revision as of 13:20, 24 April 2007

--Edmiao 22:01, 22 April 2007 (MST) um. huh? manamana. de dee be dee de. manamana. dep deede deep. manamana!

I would define intelligence as creativity. I think someday you could make a computer that could have so much programming as to be able to respond to any input appropriately and appear to hold a conversation, but it would lack creativity. It could not imagine something new and bring that idea/thing to reality. manamana! do doo de do do. manamana. do doo do do. manamana! do do de do do de doo do doodle oo do doo de do.

--Jason 13:46, 23 April 2007 (MST)I think you have hit on an important distinction here. I am not convinced that creativity is intelligence, but I certainly think its an integral part of intellect. Its one reason why I am not sold on much of Jared Diamond; his contention that primitive peoples are (or could be) more intelligent as a whole than more advanced societies strikes me as clearly untrue because they lack what I consider to be the most important piece of cultural intelligence: innovation. If they had it, they wouldnt be primitave anymore!

But with the Turing test, it doesnt really hint at creativity at all. How can we abstract creativity? Really, in many ways it is reproducable. It will be tied in with the tags as I have mentioned previously. Its a main core of my thesis, just like humor. These things arise because of an ability to reference entries marked with certain tags, and then to create a reference in a way that is not standard.

For example, we find something to be interesting or creative (according to my theory) when it is presented as long as our mind sees the product and recognizes its equivalence to a tag previously generated, then the reference is recognized. Items are most profound when we agree with the generated reference yet it was not a reference we ourselves created. Its almost like a subconscious 'Oh, I hadnt considered that, but its totally true' reaction inside yourself.

I know this isnt perfectly formulated yet, but Im hoping to get it more concrete, which is why I made this page. I appreciate hearing your comments. They help me to think about these things more deeply.

--Edmiao 13:56, 23 April 2007 (MST) May I ask, from where does this interest in artificial intelligence arise?

--Jason 14:07, 23 April 2007 (MST)Its a combination of two things. I took a philosophy of artificial intelligence seminar in college and it was my favorite class ever. It really got me interested in philosophy, and that interest has only grown over time. The whole thing really came together about 2 years ago when I had this breakthrough thought about how I believe humor is created inside of us and why we like it. So when I spend time thinking about it, I might as well see if I can coalesce it into something tangible. Maybe that guy with the question marks on his suit can get me a government grant to write a book about it. hehe

--Edmiao 14:33, 23 April 2007 (MST) Interesting. (btw, some of your jargon makes it hard to read for the layperson such as me "tags" and "references". i get it but have to first say, huh? oh, i get it.)

On your primitive peoples: I have no doubt that they are innovative and intelligent, they just have a lower technological development than other humans. It would be incredibly difficult to compare their intellectual capacit with other humans.

I just skimmed the Turing test on the wikipedia and it seems like a pretty inadequate test for intelligence. it is a test of language and I don't think that the ability to use language equates to intelligence. It seems well within the bounds of likely hood that a computer could learn language and how to converse on any topic that you gave it enough data on. Likewise the same with people, we can converse intelligently on any subject we are versed in, but when you start to talk to someone such as myself about the nature of intelligence, I only spit out nonsensical strings of words in a vain attempt to sound intelligent. a computer could easily do that.

Where does the line between intelligent and not intelligent lie? is this intelligent? Is a bacteria intelligent when it uses chemosensors to direct motility towards food and away from noxious stimuli?

As to humor, perhaps humor requires intelligence, but intelligence is not determined by the capacity for humor. Imagine a culture that has no humor (like the vulcans in star trek; sure they are fictional but could exist); those people would not be defined as not intelligent.

--Jason 15:34, 23 April 2007 (MST)I disagree about primitive peoples. If they innovated they would invent new things, and as they continued to invent eventually they would cease to be primitive. If it could be shown that these peoples had existed for a significantly shorter period and therefore havent had the time to create the necessary innovations, that would be a different case. Yet as far as I know, they have existed for as long as any other group of people, yet instead of inventing new things and stretching their boundaries they continue to live as previous with little change. Of course it could be argued that this is due to some cultural over dependence on tradition. That wouldnt make the individuals less intelligent, but when I spoke of them I wasnt speaking of individual intelligence, I was speaking of cultural intelligence, which is certainly lower (by my definition).

About the Turing test, Im not sure its just a test of language. The machine must respond in such a way as to be indistinguishable from a human being. If it can carry on a conversation in this manner, thats much more than just language. Its recognition of humor and idiom, grammar and syntax, forwarding of opinion, and anything else that may occur in a conversation. What this really attempts to understand is what makes us different from a giant database? Thats the important question here. Once we can agree what that is, we can then determine if its something we can abstract and reproduce, or if it is somehow mystical.

As of yet, I dont know that answer. I dont even have a well formulated belief.

--Edmiao 16:24, 23 April 2007 (MST) this is proof positive that you have too much time to think about philosophy because you have escewed gaming. think you're coming back ever?

--Jason 16:45, 23 April 2007 (MST)Philosophy is very important to me. My problem with gaming is I cant handle any kind of conflict right now. Any kind of argument or disagreement just frustrates me and can make me unreasonably mad. So, I dont know. I will start gaming again someday, but its hard for me to decide if Im coming back there because the group is so large. I want to play in a group of 3-4 people and no more. Still, you guys are my best friends so that weighs heavily in your favor.

--Edmiao 17:12, 23 April 2007 (MST) btw, we're going to see spider man at the imax saturday 1:30 opening weekend. see the current events page.

--Gdaze 10:03, 24 April 2007 (MST) I always thought the problems with computers is that they can't come up with how to deal with things not programmed into them. However, this was a long time ago... And I know NOTHING about programming.

I've wondered that about primitive peoples myself. Why did some cultures expand their scientific knowledge while others didn't? I think in some cases, like Rome and China, they stopped because they didn't really need to. They just didn't see any reason to expand... Maybe this is why primitive people do it as well? I mean just because a culture doesn't become more advanced doesn't mean it can't, maybe they just have no desire to? I dunno, when I try to say ideas, they come out all scattered at first. Anyway, AI and human intelligence are really interesting topics. The guy who is making the power armor in Japan basically says that AI is impossible, so instead let’s augment humans. Get this... his company's name is Cyberdine, and the suit is called H.A.L.

--Edmiao 10:28, 24 April 2007 (MST) that is so awesome. but its already been done, see the armored human in project grizzly. I think that technological advancement is driven by several components. First, ther is the ability to progress that is limited or enabled by the genetics that define your intellectual maximum capacity. Second, the potential must be realized; this requires a culture and society that encourages intellectual growth and emphasizes technological improvement over maintaining the status quo. Third, the rate of technological development is probably highly dependent upon the need for it, so if food is plentiful, and your culture is such that the population is stable over time, then there is likely no strong drive to create technologic advances. On the other hand, if your society is competing with neighbors for resources and has a growing population, then technologic advancement will be strongly selected for.

Ben here: despite Jason's misgivings, I'd suggest you and gabe read Guns, Germs, and Steel. "The Third Chimpanzee" also by Jared Diamond is fairly interesting although it doesn't discuss this exact topic (while GGS does).

--Jason 11:34, 24 April 2007 (MST)That book has a lot of interesting and well researched info concerning what Ed was talking about. I dont dislike the book, I just disagree with a few premises from the foreward, the stuff in the actual meat of the book is pretty interesting and solidly presented.

--Edmiao 11:47, 24 April 2007 (MST) i've heard of that book, i'll have to read it. from skimming the summary on wikipedia, it sounds like he investigates intelligently what i was suggesting off the cuff (with no evidence besides racism, bias and superstition). is it an engaging read? I have this bad habit of choosing to read books that i think i should read without realizing that I'm out of the habbit of reading in general, and then it takes me forever to finish them. I recently read "Tale of Two Cities" over like 6 months. Now I'm reading Anansi_Boys by Neil Gaiman which seems like it will only take me a week and a half to finish.

--Jason 12:00, 24 April 2007 (MST)I am a terrible reader so it takes me forever anyway. I just basically read a chapter here and there in that book and skip to what seems interesting. Its what I do with philosophy books too. I just picked up Dune off of Skippys shelf and started it, who knows if I can finish it.

--Edmiao 12:04, 24 April 2007 (MST)I always liked Dune. Just learned that Neil Gaiman was a guest writer for Spawn and created Angela, Cogliostro, and midieval spawn.

--Jason 12:10, 24 April 2007 (MST)Yeah, and he got into a creator war to keep his copyright on them with dickhead Todd MacFarlane too. I think they settled out of court. Im about 50 pages into Dune and I can groove on the Paul Atreides parts but its hard for me to pay attention to the Harkonnens or Bene Geserit.

--Edmiao 12:16, 24 April 2007 (MST) I'm working so hard. So Gaiman also wrote the Sandman graphic novel series. I should read that, and the Watchmen too. Been a long time since i read Dune. But I would think you could identify with the Harkonnens, isn't the baron a morbidly obese boy loving prick?

--Matts 12:17, 24 April 2007 (MST)Not to add anything to this debate, but ultimately the difficulty with "artificial intelligence" (while I'd argue that intelligence isn't synonymous with human thought, we'll go with the flow here) is that computers as they exist are really bad at pattern matching; that's not to say that they can't do it, it's just to say that the human brain somehow has specialized mechanisms for the kind of probabalistic modeling that allows us to recognize context at a glance. A computer is notoriously bad at that sort of recognition, usually only achieving it with reams of iteration, which it's extremely good at, but doesn't scale well to large problem spaces. The human mind has this capacity to make a snap judgement about when we've recieved enough information to move forward. Implementing those sorts of controls in a program is exceedingly difficult, but I'm pretty sure that's fundamentally what machine learning is all about.

There's some thought that with quantum computers we'll be able to more accurately model the non-deterministic nature of the human brain, but given that we understand so little about it, that seems like a long shot.

As for "thought", I'd define it (dismissively and unfairly) as the computational process of our brain. More specifically, the computational process our brain goes through when adapting to a problem that's difficult for its mechanisms. Hence, (and with no real proof or rigorous analysis to go along with it) I'd say that a computer is indeed "thinking" when it's iterating over a large set of data.

That still leaves totally untouched the question of "where does synthesis come from".

--Jason 12:18, 24 April 2007 (MST)Ive heard he is actually a necrophiliac too, which Im totally in to, like the rest. I just cant forgive him for installing anti-grav platforms to levitate his fat. I figure once you have spent your whole life achieving such an amazing girth, the least you can do is treat your feet to the pleasure of bearing the weight.

--Gdaze 12:20, 24 April 2007 (MST) Ah I shall try to. I've been reading a book on the history of the tattoo in Europe... but it is overdue actually... It also takes me forever to read anything. Whooo my meds are making me really drowsy.... Need to sleep. And that grizzly armor hardly counts... H.A.L. actually allows the user to not get as tired quickly. Although we are working on several as well. H.A.L. actually isn't fully armored though, more like a exo-suit.