I've often thought there's a difference between Recognition Intelligence and Planning Intelligence.
If you threaten a mouse, it will remember the safest place it can reach, plan a route, and run there. If you threaten an insect, it will find the safest place within immediate reach, go there and stay. This makes mice *way* better at escaping. Even though they're only slightly better at telling which spaces are safe.
I think fish, lizards, and gpt-3 variants are all in the insect category, though I've never had to chase those out of my kitchen.
I think the point about complex intelligence implying gradual progress is not necesarily true.
Humans are able to do science, build a civilization and do lots of things our primate relatives can't.
Theres clearly some discontinuity in impact there whatever the source.
Even if it turned out that's a result of a combination of thousands of tricks that only work when you have all of them that doesn't seem like it would necesarily mean progress will be incremental.
Or at least it could be incremental but then at some point you get enough tricks to add up to being able to get culture and do science and basically you get a big discontinuous jump that in humans looked like going from not being able to take over the world to being able to.
Also it's posible there is some simple trick that makes it possible to generate all components of intelligence.
The world were human intelligence isn't simple is not necesarily the world were some simple algoritm like gradient descent can't assemble it's pieces, like evolution did.
I'm generally convinced by Heinrich that the big divergence humans have are around knowledge transmission with our big brains being a quantitative more than a qualitative change allowing us to stuff the full of more sophisticated understandings. But also see Suzana Herculano-Houzel's work on how primate brains are qualitatively different from the brains of other mammals.
Confusing. Most/all of these items have been researched and discussed for decades, if not 100s of years by various scientists, archeologists, philosophers, etc.
One of the big break throughs was E. O. Wilson's work in sociobiology, late 1970s.
Iain McGhilchrist's work in evolutionary psychology is astonishing.
>> What really does distinguish “behaviorally modern” humans from earlier hominids?
Great question. The answer is SIZE. Human brains grew nearly 3x in the last 3 million years changing us greatly from our ape cousins.
People will argue about "what really is IQ and intelligence" and try to dance a million qualities of intelligence on the needle head of a productive argument. But one thing we do know for certain is:: size does matter. But Einstein's head was not 3x bigger than the average human so size is not everything.
Neanderthal brains were bigger, but lacked sophistication and required more energy, meaning that neanderthals had to eat more than "modern humans", and thus were metabolically less efficient.
McGhilchrist claims that a lot of the increase in brain size was to add INHIBITION circuitry so that early modern humans could form more intense, socially cooperative kinship groups for survival.
I've often thought there's a difference between Recognition Intelligence and Planning Intelligence.
If you threaten a mouse, it will remember the safest place it can reach, plan a route, and run there. If you threaten an insect, it will find the safest place within immediate reach, go there and stay. This makes mice *way* better at escaping. Even though they're only slightly better at telling which spaces are safe.
I think fish, lizards, and gpt-3 variants are all in the insect category, though I've never had to chase those out of my kitchen.
I think the point about complex intelligence implying gradual progress is not necesarily true.
Humans are able to do science, build a civilization and do lots of things our primate relatives can't.
Theres clearly some discontinuity in impact there whatever the source.
Even if it turned out that's a result of a combination of thousands of tricks that only work when you have all of them that doesn't seem like it would necesarily mean progress will be incremental.
Or at least it could be incremental but then at some point you get enough tricks to add up to being able to get culture and do science and basically you get a big discontinuous jump that in humans looked like going from not being able to take over the world to being able to.
Also it's posible there is some simple trick that makes it possible to generate all components of intelligence.
The world were human intelligence isn't simple is not necesarily the world were some simple algoritm like gradient descent can't assemble it's pieces, like evolution did.
I'm generally convinced by Heinrich that the big divergence humans have are around knowledge transmission with our big brains being a quantitative more than a qualitative change allowing us to stuff the full of more sophisticated understandings. But also see Suzana Herculano-Houzel's work on how primate brains are qualitatively different from the brains of other mammals.
re: re-inventing the wheel?
Confusing. Most/all of these items have been researched and discussed for decades, if not 100s of years by various scientists, archeologists, philosophers, etc.
One of the big break throughs was E. O. Wilson's work in sociobiology, late 1970s.
Iain McGhilchrist's work in evolutionary psychology is astonishing.
For those like me who wanted to look up that final person, there's no 'h' directly after the 'G' in McGilchrist.
>> What really does distinguish “behaviorally modern” humans from earlier hominids?
Great question. The answer is SIZE. Human brains grew nearly 3x in the last 3 million years changing us greatly from our ape cousins.
People will argue about "what really is IQ and intelligence" and try to dance a million qualities of intelligence on the needle head of a productive argument. But one thing we do know for certain is:: size does matter. But Einstein's head was not 3x bigger than the average human so size is not everything.
Neanderthal brains were bigger, but lacked sophistication and required more energy, meaning that neanderthals had to eat more than "modern humans", and thus were metabolically less efficient.
McGhilchrist claims that a lot of the increase in brain size was to add INHIBITION circuitry so that early modern humans could form more intense, socially cooperative kinship groups for survival.
Michael Levin says intelligence is in the eye of the beholder. An ant hill is intelligent too.
postmodern relativism is anti-science