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My rant about “system dynamics” stuff I’ll save for another day. It shares many features of Singularitarianism. The OG system dynamics Limits to Growth report rhymes closely with “runaway AGI” type thinking.
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My most basic commitment might be this: there have been models of universal computers and universal function approximators since Leibniz, but that does NOT mean “general intelligence” is a well-posed concept. I don’t think general intelligences exist basically.
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An intelligence is NOT a powerful universal function approximator wrapped in a “context.” An intelligence is a stable and continuous ontic-structural history for a specific starter lump of mass-energy. The primary way to “measure” it is in terms how long it lives.
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“Death” is dissolution of ontic-structural integrity for a *physical system*, and this destroys it as an existing intelligence. Ideas like uploads and mind-state-transfer are both ill-posed and uninteresting for anything complex enough to be called “intelligent.”
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Unless of course you invent exact quantum-state cloning for macro-scale things. In which case teleporting to Alpha Centauri would be more interesting, and it wouldn’t be a way to cheat death.
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Another way to think of it: intelligence is the whole territory of the physical system that embodies it. No reductive model-based state transfer preserving ontic-structural integrity and continuity will be possible. Cloning an intelligence is not like copying software code.
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I’m not saying this quite right. An intelligence exists within a thermodynamic boundary that separates it from the environment but firs not *isolate* it. The nature of the intelligence is entangled with the specific environment and the boundary actually embodies much of it.
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Replying to
I disagree pretty strongly with you on both accounts. The hard problem is only hard because that's the way it is posed. It's the same basic error as Searle's artificial separation of syntax and semantics (obviating pragmatics):
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Replying to
I'm not sure which crowd you think I'm with. The thing is that I completely agree with you on the poverty of the IQ++ model of intelligence and the otherwise intellectual bankruptcy of the (utilitarian) LW model of AGI that dominates the discourse.
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