“Computer science is of two minds about artificial intelligence (AI). Some computer scientists believe in so-called “Strong†AI, which holds that all human thought is completely algorithmic, that is, it can be broken down into a series of mathematical operations. What logically follows, they contend, is that AI engineers will eventually replicate the human mind and create a genuinely self-conscious robot replete with feelings and emotions.
Others embrace “Weak†AI, the notion that human thought can only be simulated in a computational device. If they are right, future robots may exhibit much of the behavior of persons, but none of these robots will ever be a person; their inner life will be as empty as a rock’s.†~ Selmer Bringsjord—a professor of logic and AI in the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Strong AI v Weak AI.
The above argument rests on how we define intelligence. And Bringsjord believes he has the answer. It’s creativity. He contends that any human thought that could be algorithmically reduced could also be AI. What actually separates and distinguishes real human intelligence from computer intelligence is something that cannot be made into mathematical formula or translated into numbers. Why creativity? Because it requires that we feel using all five senses, we remember using all five senses, we instinctively know, and that we experience human affairs in the real world. Novelists and poets could do these really well. The plots, the twists, the betrayal, the revenge. Anyone who can refute this?
[ I’m not sure if this topic has been done before, if it’s been discussed already, my apologies. We can scrap this. ]
To me intelligence, creativity, and the capacity to solve problems are all synominous.
I mean I suppose their are some people who claim to be creative without being very intelligent, say an artist who had poor grades. But my typical reply to this is Poppycock. To be able to make a successfull peice of art there are many problems that present themselves that one must solve. The problem with grades must have been something other than brute intelligence.
As far as robots lacking as novelist- I think this will largely depend on how much of the information you listed we can give them. To what degree can we tune their senses, to what degree can we let them expericance the human social world (can we have unoticeable androids?) and so on.
I think the reason we don’t see how creative computers are now, because we understand how they work. But once they start becomeing self aware, they will precive their own creativity as they marvel “How did I think of that?” (That sort of “instinctive” knowing you talk about.)
This one guy tries to and has succeeded on some level on creating a machine which tells stories which he argues is the basis of an AI, so studying stories and trying to find patterns in them is one way of trying to program an imagination into a machine (maybe).
What would “true” intelligence mean. We could debate endlessly about what it is…but I sort of know what it’s not. It’s not merely grades…grades are marks of action and ability. One could have the ability/aptitude, but not the have taken the necessary action…and one could exert so much action that ability/aptitude becomes less of an ingredient in the grade. Grades are not an accurate measure of intelligence. I think the best measure is IQ. Not a perfect one, but the best. A stanford-binet test does the trick.
creativity is putting combinations together in various ways…nothing more. It may seem mysterious to us, since it’s not immediately evident to us what’s going on exactly. Basically, in art, you’re putting together combinations of things, using the human experience as a guide. Since the human experience is subtle beyond our description, it’s unlikely computers will be able to adopt the subtleties of human creativity any time soon. But they will, theoretically, and there’s nothing mysterious about it.
Is the ability to put together novel combinations a sign of intelligence? I think not. I think intelligence is a mind that is fast, accurate and alert, disproportionately so to the majority of society.
Actually, Philip K. Dick, the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep pretty much pigeon holed human intelligence into empathy. Those who have empathy deserve to be called humans. I think this is what he means.
How, precisely, do you mean intelligence in this case? I agree that grades are not indicative of intelligence, but I also do not think that IQ tests are either. All an IQ test measures is your ability to take a standardized test. Some people happen to be better at it than others. No, it’s not quite as standardized as other tests, but that’s what it boils down to.
I tend to see intelligence as curiosity. For example, if the hot water in your shower doesn’t seem to be hot enough, you can bitch about it. Or you can just go to your water heater and adjust the temperature control. If you read something that refers to a particular concept or story, you can skip that part and ignore what the author was trying to say, or you can jump online and google the information you need to get a better understanding.
I guess the more intelligent you become on a subject, the greater the possibility you have of unleashing your creative abilities.
I see creativity as a way of thinking. It is looking at something and seeing it differently than everyone else. It would almost be a measure of individuality and free thought.
I believe it is a measure of intelligence, but not the only one. It is just a single trait in the many traits one can have in becoming more intelligent.
Yeh, his writings are what I based my question on. Dick examines what is human in almost all his writings I’ve read to this day. That’s why I wonder if it could be done in reality.
Yes it can be modeled as a selfish calculation, but you maintain that there are no forms of empathy that stem from purely unselfish calculations, I disagree. If you explain to me why buddhists or mystics in general who have experienced bliss of the no-ego/no-mind void and turned back from what they experience as bliss to teach others how to reach it as a selfish calculation, then maybe I will believe that all empathy can be seen to be partly a selfish calculation. Not that this example is the only one I can give of empathy. You can say that they receive gratification from teaching, but then I ask: wouldn’t they stay at that bliss-state of consciousness if there were any selfish motivations behind their action?
Then you can go on to ask how/why I can mantain that there is no-ego state, and I would answer ‘because there is enough credible evidence of it in the field of psychology/biology of consciousness.’. Ego is a learned grid and can be undone/weakened into a state in which it no longer dictates your actions.
Even to program human-like empathy that spawns from selfish calculations you’d need to program to concept of ego into a computer.
We don’t even know ourselves fully, so how can someone credibly maintain that we can build something which is exactly like us down to the last detail? Blah, that resides in the realm of hypotheses only. Based on current knowledge we can only build something which approaches what we are, not what we are in itself.
If we posit an AI which is ‘exactly’ (impossibility) like me, in the similar setting I am in now, with my brain and things I know etc everything. The AI is sitting in a parallel universe which is exactly like the one I am sitting in. We simultaneously start writing this post, our postings should be exactly the same right? Well no, because I don’t know what I am going to write within the next 5 minutes, I think about how I see the subject as I go along and so would he, but his opinion would be different, because my thinking isn’t fixed." Space-monkeys with clown suits", didn’t see that line coming up in this context right? Well neither did I. When we delve into the realm of irrational thought my counterpart might’ve not used that example, he might’ve pulled a ‘universe is a coconut’ or something like that, I can’t really know.
The breaking down the human thought to parts is saying that we are somehow predetermined to think a certain way at a certain time, and that our thinking is fixed. There is no fixedness unless you hold dogmas that are unchanging beliefs.
Dogs are intelligent creatures and yet we don’t normally think of them as being creative.
If the question is asking what is the minimal required capacity in order that we would treat a machine with the same deference that we extend to humans, my answer is that the machine should have to exhibit compassion; or better yet, love.
If our highest human attribute were our intelligence then we’d surely be interesting biological specimens. And yet I say that it’s our capacity for compassion, our ability to love our lives and the lives of others that truly sets us apart from the furniture of the universe.
Compassion and love can be programmed into a machine. But they can’t feel it themselves. You can see the outward signs of compassion and easily program an attribute to exhibit those signs. However having the machine feel the same way is totally different. Empathy can not be programmed into a computer, because empathy is how you feel about someone else, not how you behave towards someone else. The behaviour is simply a by-product of the emotion, and not the other way around.
Taking that one step further, if there is no predetermination, what exactly makes us “who” we are? Are we defined by how we think? Taking the case of identical twins, who are biologicaly exactly the same, but have two completely separate personalities/identities. Why is their thought process different? If it was just biological (and could therefore be replicated in an AI) this isn’t possible. The twins would behave exactly the same. Although, they do behave somewhat similarly. Most twins will explain that they have a “bond” that they are unable to explain.
This suggests to me that who we are goes far beyond the reaches of science. While biology can explain many things about the human body and brain, it can not explain what Floater referred to (in a different thread I believe) as the mind, or what some religions would define as the soul. The single thing that makes us who we are is what can not be explained, nor reproduced by science.
I feel that creativity is definitely a sign of inteligence but is not the be all and end all of it. All great minds are creative because otherwise we would have the same ideas flowing over and over again. when someone comes up with a new idea that nobody else has ever thought of then they are definitely inteligent. this kind of creativity/inteligence link is embedded within us all, and the reason we call clever people people who can think outside of the box because they are on a different plain of thought.
great ideas and notable feats of inteligence are born from creativity but there are many forms of inteligence. lots of people are classed as inteligent because they can apply knowledge learned from teachers and peers, but it is not their own. notable inteligence is definitely directly related to creativity, just what i reckon anyway, creativity is the essence of our being.
I feel that creativity is definitely a sign of inteligence but is not the be all and end all of it. All great minds are creative because otherwise we would have the same ideas flowing over and over again. when someone comes up with a new idea that nobody else has ever thought of then they are definitely inteligent. this kind of creativity/inteligence link is embedded within us all, and the reason we call clever people people who can think outside of the box because they are on a different plain of thought.
great ideas and notable feats of inteligence are born from creativity but there are many forms of inteligence. lots of people are classed as inteligent because they can apply knowledge learned from teachers and peers, but it is not their own. notable inteligence is definitely directly related to creativity, just what i reckon anyway, creativity is the essence of our being.
Without an objective definition of intelligence it is difficult to classify both of these. I see intelligence as objective “truths”, that of which any one can learn. I use the term truths lightly because the “truth” has changed through out history. Anyways, creativity on the other hand really doesn’t rely on any truth or any objectivity in a sense. It has more of an inspired characteristic. What is comes down to is that everyone can potentially be equally intelligent. Every one can know the same amount of objective truths. It is our creativity that, although may seem similar, can never be 100% duplicated. It makes all of us unique.
As for the problems of the world that have not come to truth, it is our creativity that would solve it…not something that we already know
Intelligence is really not clearly defined. I think intelligence lies in situational pursuits - there is a problem at hand which we tackle with what we’ve got and if we do that well a lot of the time with several different problems, we’re supposed to be intelligent.
I think creativity relates to situations in which we aren’t reacting to situations in which we need to be decisive. So all relavant stimuli which induce creative thought may be stimuli which could be of no real consequence to the outcome. Though this does not happen all the time.
I guess I believe that most people are creative, but few are intelligent and creative. Few are just intelligent, in that they know how to gain ground in systems. Others are creative, like renaissance painters such as Rembrandt, some scientists of old who believed in rational experimentation as the basis for knowledge like Copernicus, renegade serial killers like Jack the Ripper and others - but I think they need not have been intelligent about their larger perspectives, such as their persoal lives or their roles in society. Obsessive creativity without intelligence may lead to fanaticism, and intelligence without creativity makes managers (just kidding … but thats not very far from what I think) Intelligence with creativity helps one help self and society.
I think that creative people seem to disagree that there is ever a general view, let alone agree with general views or stereotypes, while intelligent ones tend to use these stereotypes to gain ground in systems of society.
There are others which are neither too intelligent and they aren’t very creative as well. Of course, things change over time, and people do too.
Also folks, just remembered something I heard from Richard Dawkins on TV abt learning in robots and such - they had to design memory systems in robots which were supposed to be anthropomorphic in both body and mind: maybe this was for the purpose of realistic AI for a television compere, for instance.
So there were two methods of learning he said - quite logically - top-down learning (algorithmic learning) and bottom-up learning. The first is a test of the amount of algorithmic and pattern related data which we can pack into a certain memory space, ad the second is perhaps a good measure of our cunning in modelling human behaviour. Rather interesting topic, actually, since it spans a lot of subjects.
So anyway I think the soft learning which was referred to is perhaps bottom up learning which relies on experience to provide corelation and what we call “knowledge” as derived from “information”. So thats another thought…
