Is a blind person less intelligent than a person capable of seeing? If so, by how much?
In my view, intelligence isn't about what senses you have available, but how intelligently you use the information you have available to you.
In my view, intelligence isn't about what senses you have available, but how intelligently you use the information you have available to you.
Our senses I believe map to this spatial-temporal model. Blind people can reason about the world the same way as those who can see, because what were really doing is modeling space, and light, audio, touch etc are just ways of gaining information
When it comes to "understanding of the world", I'd say the average blind person has less. But the gaps in their understanding are generally not particularly important parts.
Is understanding of the world equivalent to intelligence though? In my view intelligence is about optimalising the mapping from the percept sequence to action. In other words, given a sequence of percepts, does it determine the utility maximizing action.
Imagine two chess bots on uneven footing. One plays regular chess with perfect knowledge of the board. The other plays fog of war chess—it only sees the pieces on squares it attacks. In this case, the former could play suboptimally and still win against the latter. The latter can have perfect information about probabilities of pieces on tiles and act perfectly utility maximising in response and still lose. My argument is that the latter is still more intelligent despite losing. There is a difference between action and intelligence.
Similarly a human doesn't become smarter or dumber by adding or removing senses. They may make smarter or dumber decisions, but that is purely attributable to the extra information available to them.
There were many people in human history that made big achievement even though handicapped: Ludwig van Beethoven, Steven Hawking, John Nash - but yeah they haven't been born with disabilities so had their all childhood to train their brain.
I generally don't understand this obsession about needing AGI. If current LLMs can be extended to humanoid so just get motor modality and keeping current vision, audio, text ability IMHO they will excel in many fields like currently they excel in text, vision, audio than most humans.
I've never heard of cats having better motor skills, can you elaborate on that? They don't seem very good at fine movement.
Then again, my cat lacks opposable thumbs and would struggle to draw a line on a piece of paper with a pen.
A cat struggles to move their paw through the air in a smooth straight line.
So this is what I find as motor inteligence. If someone can process and think very fast we consider them intelligent and in the same way we should consider cat smart how fast and well they can plan escape from dogs chasing them or they hunting for prey. Imagine how difficult would be to make robot to do this all calculation about different jumps etc.