Very interesting Post, learned a lot- I enjoyed the touch of humor as well!
A question or simply a thought perhaps...recognizing intelligence can be subjective, especially when it diverges significantly from our own cognitive abilities. How do we determine if a system or organism possesses intelligence when it functions in ways that are unfamiliar or incomprehensible to us? Are there alternative criteria that can be used to assess intelligence beyond our human-centric perspectives?
So Wolfram is practically addressing that question with an anything possible within a working system (cause how else can it be working). It matters on how we look at it.
I am actually satisfied with his explanation of it (maybe because I agree lol). I might give the book a read now.
Very interesting Post, learned a lot- I enjoyed the touch of humor as well!
A question or simply a thought perhaps...recognizing intelligence can be subjective, especially when it diverges significantly from our own cognitive abilities. How do we determine if a system or organism possesses intelligence when it functions in ways that are unfamiliar or incomprehensible to us? Are there alternative criteria that can be used to assess intelligence beyond our human-centric perspectives?
Here is more from Wolfram on this, "Perhaps it could be the ability to learn and remember. Or the
ability to adapt to a wide range of different and complex situations. Or
the ability to handle abstract general representations of data
At first, all of these might seem like reasonable indicators of true
intelligence. But as SOOn as one tries to think about them independent
of the particular example of human intelligence, it becomes much less
clear. And indeed, from the discoveries in this book I am now quite
certain that any of them can actually be achieved in systems that we
would normally never think of as showing anything like intelligence.
Learning and memory, for example, can effectively occur in any
system that has structures that form in response to input, and that can
to
persist for a long time and affect the behavior of the system. And this
can happen even in simple cellular automata- or, say, in a physical
system like a fluid that carves out a long-term pattern ina solid surface.
Adaptation to all sorts of complex situations also occurs in a
great many systems. It is well recognized when natural selection is
present. But at some level it can also be thought of as occurring
whenever a constraint ends up getting satisfied- -even say that a fluid
flowing around a complex object minimizes the energy it dissipates
Handling abstraction is also in a sense rather common. Indeed, as
soon as one thinks of a system as performing computations one can
immediately view features of those computations as being like abstract
representations of input to the system
So given all of this is there any way to define a general notion of
a
true intelligence? My guess is that ultimately there is not, and that in
fact any workable definition of what we normally think of as
intelligence will end up having to be tied to all sorts of seemingly rather
specific details of human intelligence
And as it turns out this is quite similar to what happens if one
tries to define the seemingly much simpler notion of life."
TLDR. We don't know what we haven't experienced. But, here are some guide posts:
1) Does it have memory?
2) Does it adapt?
3) Can it handle abstraction?
So Wolfram is practically addressing that question with an anything possible within a working system (cause how else can it be working). It matters on how we look at it.
I am actually satisfied with his explanation of it (maybe because I agree lol). I might give the book a read now.
I still debate if computation is at the core of the Universe or is there something not computable.... some would call it, God.
There is still so much to see in this Universe and contemplate about its birth.