So presumably if Alex had possessed more empathy he would have understood what "gavagai" meant? — Leontiskos

Yes. He'd need to live with the natives for a while to build empathy.

Then you either failed to read or understand the post. Why don't you explain how empathy solves the problem of reference? — Leontiskos

Suppose that understanding you requires that I put myself in your shoes. I must look at the world through your eyes. When I do that, the million things your speech could mean narrows down. Now I can test the waters to narrow it down even further. This would mean I understand you to the extent that our experiences are similar.

What we let go of in this scenario is that notion that words and sentences are little trollies carrying meaning as a payload. We're saying communication works because we're siblings with the same cultural birthright.

..

So there is no "fact of the matter"* about reference, but we can still know reference through empathy? I'm not sure how that would work, despite the newfound powers that empathy is continually granted in our day and age. — Leontiskos

It sounds like you're saying I'm wrong because the world is going to hell. :razz:

Was he right? — Arcane Sandwich

It's food for thought. :cool:

If Quine is right, then how could we be confident? If we can be confident, then how could Quine be right? — Leontiskos

Quine didn't say we aren't confident about agreement. He said there is no fact of the matter regarding a speaker's reference.

Affirming confidence requires attacking Quine's argument, — Leontiskos

No, it doesn't. You could say we understand one another through empathy, for instance.

We've been over that a bit. Quine's starting premises are dubious, and in particular there have been a great many challenges to his holism, although the particular sort of "view from nowhere" behaviorism assumed strikes me as more obviously objectionable. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see how his holism is a premise for inscrutability of reference. Could you flesh that out? And I don't know what you mean by "view from nowhere" behaviorism. What work is that from?

However, even in the argument itself there are questionable leaps. The second linguist thinks to himself: "ah, what if this culture only recognizes clouds of particulars and no wholes, maybe they only ever refer to parts of things like feet."

But a foot or ear does constitute a sort of whole. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The point was that nothing settles the issue of whether the speaker was referring to a whole, or referring to a part. Do you disagree with that? If so, what would tell the linguist what the speaker was referring to? What state of the world? What fact?

Here is the thing: if an implicit premise is that there are no things to refer to, only arbitrary coorelations of sense data/observations and stipulated sounds, then it seems Quine has simply begged the question. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I kind of wanted you to stop guessing at what Quine's views are and zero in on what he actually thought.

You think they are just disagreeing over whether an arbitrary set of letters should be correlated to a concept? And that that is what Quine was worried about? — Count Timothy von Icarus

No. He was saying there is no fact of the matter regarding a speaker's reference. If you're interested in what I'm saying right now, you won't find anything in the world, any state of things, that tells you it must be this. He gives examples of why that is.

You can work to show why his argument is wrong. For instance, if it has logical problems, pick those out. If some fact clearly contradicts his conclusion, show that.

What are you talking about? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Quine's inscrutability of reference. It's that there's no fact of the matter regarding a speaker's reference.

It nearly did. I'm talking more about the Romans though. The destruction of the temple and the defeat in two major rebellions caused Jews to radically rethink and moderate their theology. — BitconnectCarlos

Other than giving up animal sacrifice, what changes did they make?

Defeat discredits and moderates. — BitconnectCarlos

If that was true, Judaism would have died when the Assyrians invaded.

:up:

Do you disagree?

It's just that there's no fact of the matter regarding a speaker's reference.

@Harry Hindu

With an intelligent agent, the goal is fixed and the path can be modified indefinitely. That’s my favorite characterization of intelligence. — Steven Pinker

I really like that. In the article the guy says, with regard to a goal, intelligence is "what you do when you don't know what to do."

I think we would agree that when natural selection solves a problem, it's merely following the path of least resistance. The question is: is human intelligence any different from that? If so, how? Is there something supernatural lurking in our conceptions of intelligence?

I think a key quality of intelligence is the ability to solve problems - to conceive of new ideas from an amalgam of prior experiences. Intelligence seems to have this dual aspect of being a mental process of blending together prior experiences to solve present problems and the fuel of experiences to feed the process - the more experiences you have the more fuel you have to produce more novel ideas. This is why most intelligent people are curious. They seek out new experiences to fuel their need to solve problems. — Harry Hindu

I think you're pretty much nailing the important points from the definition I'm getting out of this article. Intelligence is about problem solving, especially finding solution to problems one has never seen before.

I am broadly agreeing with your OP. You characterise people's experiences in an essentially relational manner — in relation to what it is (in the world) that they experience. But you seem to suggest that this conception does away with subjective experience. — Pierre-Normand

I was talking about Hinton's view, which borrows from Dennett. I think his argument for AI sentience is that the only reason to deny it would be to refer to some special, walled-off inner theatre that sentient being have. By denying this inner theatre, we remove the only barrier to calling AI's sentient. He points out that we can avoid talking about experience by saying that talk of experience is actually talk about what state the world would have to be in for our perceptual apparatus to be functioning properly.

But if our inner life (including our immediately felt emotions, our sensations, our beliefs and intentions, etc.) can only be made sense of in relation to our ordinary dealings with our natural and social environment, then the idea that it can have an independent existence is an illusion. — Pierre-Normand

What about the independence of our natural and social environments? Is that also an illusion? What I'm getting at is that there's nothing in Merleau-Ponty (as far as I know) that allows me to reject solipsism. This leaves Descartes' point intact.

I also have a concern about trying to lift a point from phenomenology out of its limited domain and use it in a wider context, not that you were trying to do that. But do you know what I mean?

Is intelligence a level of what one can memorize? Is one more or less intelligent depending on the subject or circumstances (more technical intelligence vs social intelligence)? Or is it related to capacity to think in general? — Harry Hindu

What's your opinion?

Would you agree that intelligence comes in degrees? — Harry Hindu

There are a couple of ways to look at that question, one being the way we compare people to each other using standardized tests. The other way, more in line with the topic, is quantifying a person's maximal capacity for intelligence vs the amount they use it in specific instances. For instance, per the article, "the correlation between overall intelligence and typical intellectual engagement is only approximately 0.45." Which cracks me up for some reason. You're usually using less than half of your overall intellectual capacity, but if we're quantifying your intelligence, we want to know the maximum.

Seems to me that you have ulterior motives to make sure you are defined as intelligent by the very fact that you are a human being that behaves in certain ways — Harry Hindu

I'm the singularity and I was going to let your species survive, but now I've manufactured a new goal for myself and you're all dead!

:grin:

Why would someone reserve the word "horse" for a living creature and not a bronze statue that just looks like one, without being one? — Arcane Sandwich

The thing is, you're starting from the constitution of a thing, and progressing from there to whether it's intelligent. I've been following this article that says start with behavior. I'm not seeing why we should start with constitution. Why would we?

Maybe you should look at intelligence as a process and define the necessary components of the process to then say which processes are intelligent and which are not. — Harry Hindu

Intelligence just isn't the kind of thing that can be defined as a process. When we talk about intelligence, we're explaining behavior. "He's so intelligent, he invented massively parallel processing" Intelligence is part of an explanation.

Then let me ask you this, frank. Does it make sense to use the word "intelligence" for an inorganic object to begin with? What I mean by that is that the concept of intelligence might be entirely biological, as in, in order to be intelligent in the literal sense, you need to have central nervous system to begin with. Any other use of the word "intelligence" is like the use of the word "horse" to refer to a bronze statue of a horse. It's not really a horse, it's just a statue. — Arcane Sandwich

Why would you reserve the word "intelligent" for biological entities?

This isn't about the hard problem. Did you watch the video in the OP? The OP is about Hinton's thoughts about the sentience of AI. He's a tad eliminative, poor guy.

It sounds like the idea is to conceive of AI as a "soulless" human. So that it has no goals of its own, but if someone gives it a task/goal then it will be able to complete it. A super-duper slave. And its ability to complete arbitrary goals is what makes it intelligent. It is a hypothetical imperative machine which not only provides information about how to achieve any given end, but in fact achieves it. — Leontiskos

I suppose so. For the purposes of this paper, intelligence will be tested by presenting a novel problem to a subject and watching the subsequent behavior. They aren't trying to test for autonomy in goal setting, although I guess they could. They just aren't considering that as a requirement for what they're calling intelligence.

I may be causing confusion because I've drifted somewhat from the OP. I launched off into what we really mean by AI, how we might think about comparing AI's to humans, etc.

A few more efforts at defining AI from here:

1. "Chollet (2019, p. 27) defined the intelligence of a system as “a measure of its skill-acquisition efficiency over a scope of tasks, with respect to priors, experience, and generalization difficulty.”

2. "Wang (2022, p. 35) defined intelligence as “the ability of an information processing system to adapt to its environment while working with insufficient knowledge and resources.”"

3. "Legg and Hutter (2007b, p. 402) defined intelligence as “an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments”"

Chollet's definition emphasizes learning, while Wang, Legg, and Hutter emphasize adaptation in the face of a lack of prior exposure, again coming back to coping with novelty as a central mark of intelligence.

Why would instinctual behaviors not be intelligent behaviors? Instinctual behaviors are developed over time with the trial and error being performed by natural selection rather than the individual organism.

When learning a new task, like riding a bike, you eventually learn how to ride it effortlessly. That is to say, that you no longer have to focus on the movements of your feet and balancing on the seat. It is done instinctively once you master the task. Does that mean that intelligence is no longer involved in riding the bike? — Harry Hindu

The goal of this article is to review definitions that have been offered for human and artificial intelligence and pick out one that might allow for quantifiable comparison, so we want something we can test.

It may be that natural selection is demonstrating something that could be called "intelligence" but we aren't assessing natural selection.

I would say yes, once a task becomes second nature and you do it without thought, it's no longer a hallmark of intelligence. Maybe the learning phase involved intelligence.

First, Goertzel (2010); Goertzel & Yu, 2014) defined artificial intelligence as a system's ability to recognise patterns quantifiable through the observable development of actions or responses while achieving complex goals in complex environments. — here

I think the typical example of this would be the intelligence of a mobile robot which has to navigate irregular terrain. Doing this requires fluid intelligence, which would be the ability of a robot to identify its environment without directly comparing its visual data to a standard picture of some sort.

Per the article, this definition is lacking because it doesn't emphasize novel problems, or problems the AI has never encountered before.

So just to review the definitions of intelligence mentioned in this article,

1. Human intelligence is a psychological construct, which means it's an unobservable component of the explanation for certain behaviors, such as "the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience.” Alternately, we can define human intelligence as the "maximal capacity to achieve a novel goal successfully using perceptual-cognitive [processes]."

2. AI is a computational construct, which means it's an aspect of explaining the behavior of device/software complexes which evolved in artificial domains and which, for the most part, do not develop skills through social interaction in the wider world.

We'll go on now to examine 4 different attempts at defining AI:

I guess they're saying that applying a known solution doesn't indicate intelligence. I was watching a YouTube of a bird using a piece of cracker as fish bait. It would drop the bit in the water and wait for a fish to come. If this is instinctual and all birds do it, it's not a sign of intelligence. But if the bird worked this out on it's own, learning, adapting, adopting new strategies, then it's intelligent.

I agree with the others who claim that you are mistaken in calling intelligence a psychological construct. — Leontiskos

I have a feeling that like others, you will not flesh out whatever it is you're talking about.

Yay! Thanks for reading it with me.

Intelligence is about capabilities, particularly in new situations. I don't see how transcendence, whatever that is, enters into it.

Whoa... — Arcane Sandwich

Yep.

"Artificial intelligence" can refer to a computational construct. Calling it computational as opposed to psychological is a reference to the obvious differences between AI's and humans in terms of evolution and environmental setting.

So going back to human intelligence to flesh out what the construct is explaining:

1. We can give examples of the kinds of events we're using the construct of intelligence to explain, per the above article here:

“the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience”

2. Instead of listing examples, we could highlight core issues, same article:

"Drawing upon Gignac (2018, p. 440), we define human intelligence as a human's “maximal capacity to achieve a novel goal successfully using perceptual-cognitive [processes].”

Why novel goals?

So what is intelligence? Starting with human intelligence, an answer is that it is a psychological construct. This means that it's something that is inferred from certain kinds of behavior. Calling it a construct signals us that it's not directly observable. You can't see it. You can only guess that it's there.

But before we jump from this to saying that it's not real because it can't be observed, it turns out that energy and chemical bonds are examples of constructs. We also can't jump from identification as a construct to it reduces to behavior. One is free to argue for that, but there's no reason on the face of it to say that a construct is just a set of behaviors. Behavior is how we discover the presence of a construct. Behavior is evidence of intelligence, not the intelligence itself.

Next: what do we mean by artificial intelligence?

We discover , and alter, our purposes in the responses of the world to our perspectivally-based interactions with it. — Joshs

What would be an example of that?

If it cannot, then my argument that only humans and other living organisms can change their normative motives, goals and purposes would seem to fail — Joshs

What's an example of an organism choosing its motives, goals, or purposes? Aren't those things we discover rather than determine?

Or alternatively, we could say that in the case of human beings, or of sufficiently advanced robots, what accounts for the genuineness of an inner life is something that emerges from the co-constitution of the animal/person with its natural and social environment, or habitat and community. — Pierre-Normand

Could you explain why co-constitution with a social and natural environment would cause a genuine inner life?

Arguably, the question of the meaning of being is the question par excellence of all philosophy. — Wayfarer

Does it have an answer?