On the topic of conscious AI
-
You can only recognize patterns if you have been exposed to them. This means you always need a precursor before intelligence can be established. I believe the exchange of ideas is the necessary initial precursor If the wise old monk has never moved, he can't be wise. He needs to exchange ideas before he can become wise. Once he has intelligence, inaction will diminish it. We currently score intelligence by testing the adoption and retention rate of measurable patterns. Someone who enjoys looking for patterns is considered smart. Someone who does not enjoy looking for patterns is considered dumb. So wait, does that mean I can become super smart, just reading / researching patterns? Yes. Exactly that. By any conventional measurement standard we possess, that's the thing that makes you smart. The first problem with that is that most of our patterns are assumed to be self-evident so they're never really written down in one place. Second problem is that people jealously guard the patterns they know because it gives them a measurement of power. You could call them trade secrets, but to me that seems to imply the information is somehow complex, which it often isn't.
I completely disagree with you that you can only recognize patterns you have been exposed to. The magic of pattern recognition is that Numerology is a perfect example. We can actually make up INSANE patterns and fit things to them... Also, you can study patterns in general, but below a certain IQ point, I don't think you can see them. In fact, in children, one of the key markers for IQ is not pattern recognition, but the desire to keep trying. My daughter was given an incredibly long word to try to pronounce (some chemical name, she was 7, she started reading 4), and the doctor said she outlasted everyone her age that he had tested. He had to STOP her from trying to get it right. That "Search" for the correct answer is a search for a discernible pattern you have not seen before. While I agree if you are the puzzle maker, solving the puzzle is easy... But there is a certain amount of magic to creating problems/puzzles. Take a LOW IQ individual and have them create a pattern problem for someone else to solve. You will quickly find a "Child-like" knock-knock joke formulation. (Those jokes, BTW, are a standard setup and pattern). We are drawn to such patterns. Exchanging them does NOT create intelligence, and NOT exchanging them does not DIMINISH intelligence. While I would argue that communicating complex intellectual ideas to others can CLEARLY helped develop the reasoning behind the ideas... Writing them down in a book is a future potential exchange. If the book is burned first, the OPPORTUNITY is lost, but the IQ of the person who wrote the book is NOT diminished. For the same reason. The Old Wise guy who sees the truth and beauty of the universe, and all of its inherent patterns is just as intelligent with or without ever talking to another human being. The point about this wise old person is "Who Cares?" Because their lack of interaction impacts nobody but "others", not themselves. they were fine with their life. The protection of knowledge... unfortunately as we advance as a civilization, knowledge becomes the truest medium of power and value. I, for example, just learned a TON about eating right and fasting that flies in the face of EVERYTHING we were told since the 1970s. yet in 8 weeks, I have lost 35lbs, and EVERY Blood Marker has improved. My risk of cancer, heart attack, and atherosclerosis are all markedly improved. Yep, we guard knowledge. And yep, we are often misled to the profit of others! But even those become patterns, and when you see them enough, you lea
-
I completely disagree with you that you can only recognize patterns you have been exposed to. The magic of pattern recognition is that Numerology is a perfect example. We can actually make up INSANE patterns and fit things to them... Also, you can study patterns in general, but below a certain IQ point, I don't think you can see them. In fact, in children, one of the key markers for IQ is not pattern recognition, but the desire to keep trying. My daughter was given an incredibly long word to try to pronounce (some chemical name, she was 7, she started reading 4), and the doctor said she outlasted everyone her age that he had tested. He had to STOP her from trying to get it right. That "Search" for the correct answer is a search for a discernible pattern you have not seen before. While I agree if you are the puzzle maker, solving the puzzle is easy... But there is a certain amount of magic to creating problems/puzzles. Take a LOW IQ individual and have them create a pattern problem for someone else to solve. You will quickly find a "Child-like" knock-knock joke formulation. (Those jokes, BTW, are a standard setup and pattern). We are drawn to such patterns. Exchanging them does NOT create intelligence, and NOT exchanging them does not DIMINISH intelligence. While I would argue that communicating complex intellectual ideas to others can CLEARLY helped develop the reasoning behind the ideas... Writing them down in a book is a future potential exchange. If the book is burned first, the OPPORTUNITY is lost, but the IQ of the person who wrote the book is NOT diminished. For the same reason. The Old Wise guy who sees the truth and beauty of the universe, and all of its inherent patterns is just as intelligent with or without ever talking to another human being. The point about this wise old person is "Who Cares?" Because their lack of interaction impacts nobody but "others", not themselves. they were fine with their life. The protection of knowledge... unfortunately as we advance as a civilization, knowledge becomes the truest medium of power and value. I, for example, just learned a TON about eating right and fasting that flies in the face of EVERYTHING we were told since the 1970s. yet in 8 weeks, I have lost 35lbs, and EVERY Blood Marker has improved. My risk of cancer, heart attack, and atherosclerosis are all markedly improved. Yep, we guard knowledge. And yep, we are often misled to the profit of others! But even those become patterns, and when you see them enough, you lea
It's kinda cool that your daughter got scored on her desire to "keep at it". That's an interesting metric, tbh. As an anecdote, I can share you my experience with low-IQ people coming up with puzzles: They are derivative in form and they're often incomplete, with multiple fitting solutions, and no indication of which solution will be considered "correct". A good riddle is therefor a complex pattern: it follows a structured set-up, has a clue to identify the correct answer, and has an elimination factor to exclude wrong results. By simply reading those properties, you have inevitably gained intelligence, because you automatically mesh your notion of a riddle with the properties I present. You might accept them or reject them, but you're bound by the conclusions you draw, recalling them partially the next time you have to come up with a riddle. This is the acquisition of intelligence. You digest, analyze, consolidate, repeat, forget the details. The higher your intelligence, the more patterns you can combine and reproduce with a measure of success, potentially opening up the way to more interactions and more patterns. In contrast, the more you revert to immediate self-gratification, the less complex everything becomes, which generally reduces the variance of the interactions you'll have, and the more dumb you become. Smart people who suddenly decide to watch TV all day and never go out again, don't stay smart. We're not machines that suddenly stop working, but we do deteriorate gradually over time.