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Comment by jcelerier | Hacker News Reader

> The brain-in-the-jar example presumes that the whole nervous system receives identical stimulation as-if it were embedded in the world.

I should have chosen a similar sounding thing, I really meant what I said, not the original brain-in-a-jar thought experiment.

> Incidentally, this is what people mean by intelligence... by since no one has studied the relevant science, people do not know what's required to provide it.

I don't understand how these two sentences work together: the word's meaning is defined by its usage. If tomorrow most people in the world says that being intelligent is defined by waking up at 6AM and doing 10 jumping jacks every day, then that is what the word will mean whether you want it or not.

In my "human frame of reference", "Yes, you wouldnt be intelligent if you were literally a brain in a jar.." really does not square with how intelligence is talked about for instance so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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You name things intelligent; then you have a theory as to why you name them that way.

Your theory is wrong.

Those thing which count as intelligent aren't intelligent because they're finding statistical associations in historical datasets that have been pre-made and pre-disambiguated by people.

You don't know this, because any time you theorise to explain, you require empirical investigation and decades/centuries of science. You cannot be "right by definition", you're not omniscient.

The reason that animals are intelligent isnt their cognition, narrowly. It's their bodies, broadly, which produce the input cognition requires.

In "doing all the hard work" by manufacturing data for machiens to process, we can produce computational models of cognition -- but these immitate intelligence, precisley because, the thing which we call intelligent is the very production of that data.

> You name things intelligent; then you have a theory as to why you name them that way.

but here a human being (and I suspect not the only one) names a computer program as "intelligent". The theory has to take this case into account to make it fit in its definition of intelligence: the will of human beings naming things overrides everything else. Maybe there is something else that humans have and this program doesn't, but another name has to be found for it if enough humans agree that this fit as what "intelligent" means.

> You cannot be "right by definition", you're not omniscient.

This doesn't make sense. Definitions are outside rightness / wrongness.

Ah, well if you start this project by calling present AI intelligent, then you're right.

I take the A to apply to the I, ie., AI is artificially Intelligent. Its not actually intelligent.

We didnt arrive at a notion of intelligent via digital computers. We have been talking about it for thousands of years, at least.

I am talking about the pretheoretical, intuitive notion of intelligence that doesn't prejudge the question of AI. What is it we call intelligent?

Intelligence is a kind of rapid adaption and coping to environmental change. It's a way of being responsive to an environment. Its a kind of radical underminism of response: a thermometer's response is determined. An animal, in having reasons to do things, is radically under-determined.

And thus, in acquriing specific hisotries, animals bring their own reasons to environemnts, and thus are able to cope with a vast amount of sudden change that would, eg., destroy a thermometer.

And what we are concerned with, both with real AI, and with animals is systems which are in the world with us, in this way: that are likewise radically able to cope.

> What is it we call intelligent?

> Intelligence is a kind of rapid adaption and coping to environmental change.

Who's the "we", there ? I have absolutely never heard anything remotely close to the definition of intelligence given there

Exactly in some sense we (collectively) are doing most of the hard work, by providing these models with a vast number of samples of "intelligent" behaviour and expression. An embodied system wouldn't be able to learn anything as it stands, because none of the "bootstrapping" steps humans do are adequately captured by current training methods.

Human languages exist to compress the world around us in a way that will survive being sent over sound waves and uncompressed in another brain that experiences a similar enough world around them.

Meaning that with enough words and their relations, sufficient complexity forms for its processing to result in intelligence.

Remember that an AI can process far more textual data than we can. It is still orders of magnitude smaller the amounts of information we process through our senses, but it is still a start.

> I really meant what I said, not the original brain-in-a-jar thought experiment.

In that case please explain your thought experiment in more detail. In reality if we scoop your brain into a jar your brain tissue will be dead before it hits the jar due to the lack of bloodflow. Then after a while it becomes mouldy and stinky and even more goopy than it was before. Not sure anyone would call any of that inteligent.

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