Comment by acituan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acituan | Hacker News Reader

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You are taking huge liberties in forming equivocations which mislead your conclusion.

The tacit knowledge description only talks about the acquisition process of the knowledge, not that the knowledge itself is outside bounds of rationality or the physical world. By the same token when you claim "humans have intelligence that is impossible to express through reason or codification" the entire argument hinges on the actual meaning of impossible. Is it impossible in itself, or ever, because human intelligence is non-reason based or are we using a meaning of impossible that at this day and age the process of doing that is still intractable for all intents and purposes. If you're claiming the former, that itself is such a strong claim it requires its own strong proof. If it's the latter, well we have been developing psychotechnologies for several millennia to be able to express ourselves and our cognitive processes and getting better at it, you just need to be patient.

If you found a working x86 chip in the wild, but all documentation and knowledgeable people were wiped out for some reason, I bet the process of finding out how that x86 worked would look quite similar. It wouldn't make x86 otherworldly or in need of a soul.

This is a good point, but I will add, from close discussions with Dreyfus, his position was that it's impossible because it's fundamentally impossible, not because it's intractable. (see my other comment for more)

Interesting to learn about Dreyfus, I was aware of this line of thought from Francois Chollet's article. He is the creator of Keras and some pretty advanced research papers in the nature of intelligence.

He states that the environment and embodiment are crucial for the development of intelligence. Even for humans, 'our environment puts a hard limit on our individual intelligence'.

https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/the-impossibility-of-in...

The implausibility of intelligence explosion (2017)

..

In essence we need simulators on par with reality to train human-like intelligence. BTW, take a look at ThreeDWorld, just came out: 'A High-Fidelity, Multi-Modal Platform for Interactive Physical Simulation'. We're getting closer, and AI scientists are aware of the environment problem.

http://www.threedworld.org/

Thank you, this is helpful.

I have been interested in this debate for perhaps a decade now, and to me one of the most important things to get clear is whether skeptics are just claiming X is really hard, or whether they are claiming it's impossible as a matter of principle, which are two very different things. I think this discussion is about the latter rather than the former, but that many people talk about the former as if it's relevant to the latter.

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