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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Obviously I’m not a Strong AI guy, and am pretty much in the David Chalmers camp on the hard problem.
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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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Put philosophically: intelligence is a lens that focuses information in the environment. Contemporary statistical inference AIs live in the informational equivalent of an industrial farming monoculture. Yes it has access to infinite corn. But not the variety of a real environment
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Didn’t you have a framework for how it’s more important to think about the right things than to think more effectively (in my sloppy half-remembered summary version)?
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The boundary intelligence thread linked in the next thread is sort of along those lines
This?
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1/ I'd like to make up a theory of intelligence based on a 2-element ontology: boundary and interior intelligence
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