Hacker News Reader

Comment by justonenote | Hacker News Reader

I mean some people have a definition of intelligence that includes a light switch, it has an internal state, it reacts to external stimuli to affect the world around it, so a light switch is more intelligent than a rock.

Leaving aside where you draw the line of what classifies as intelligence or not , you seem to be invoking some kind of non-materialist view of the human mind, that there is some other 'essence' that is not based on fundamental physics and that is what gives rise to intelligence.

If you subscribe to a materialist world view, that the mind is essentially a biological machine then it has to follow that you can replicate it in software and math. To state otherwise is, as I said, invoking a non-materialistic view that there is something non-physical that gives rise to intelligence.

View on HN

No, you don’t need to reach for non-materialistic views in order to conclude that we don’t have a mathematical model (in the sense that we do for an LLM) for how the human brain thinks.

We understand neuron activation, kind of, but there’s so much more going on inside the skull-neurotransmitter concentrations, hormonal signals, bundles with specialized architecture-that doesn’t neatly fit into a similar mathematical framework, but clearly contributes in a significant way to whatever we call human intelligence.

> it all rests on (relatively) simple mathematics. We know this is true. We also know that means it has limitations and can't actually reason information.

This was the statement I was responding to, it is stating that because it's built on simple mathematics it _cannot_ reason.

Yes we don't have a complete mathematical model of human intelligence, but the idea that because it's built on mathematics that we have modelled, that it cannot reason is nonsensical, unless you subscribe to a non-materialist view.

In a way, he is saying (not really but close) that if we did model human intelligence with complete fidelity, it would no longer be intelligence.

Any model we can create of human intelligence is also likely to be incomplete until we start making complete maps of peoples brains since we all develop differently and take different paths in life (and in that sense it's hard to generalize what human intelligence even is). I imagine at some point someone will come up with a definition of intelligence that inadvertently classifies people with dementia or CTE as mindless automatons.

It feels like a fool's errand to try and quantify intelligence in an exclusionary way. If we had a singular, widely accepted definition of intelligence, quantifying it would be standardized and uncontroversial, and yet we have spent millennia debating the subject. (We can't even agree on how to properly measure whether students actually learned something in school for the purposes of advancement to the next grade level, and that's a much smaller question than if something counts as intelligent.)

Don't we? Particle physics provides such a model. There is a bit of difficulty in scaling the calculations, but it is sort of like the basic back propagation in a neural network. How <insert modern AI functionality> arises from back propagation and similar seems compared to how human behavior arises from particle physics, in that neither our math nor models can predict any of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com