@GregSadler

Without meaning to suggest that the things people are circulating that they are calling artificial intelligence are in fact intelligence at all--because I don't think they are more than mere parlor tricks for now--but only because I do you think artificial intelligence is not so inconceivable, and certainly alternate intelligence in other animals either here on Earth or elsewhere in the universe is not inconceivable, I am led the question whether time is the relevant quantity here. Using present AIs as a stand-in, it seems clear to me that the processing speed of intelligent beings might vary quite substantially.

I sometimes think of the plants in my garden as slow animals. The strangler vines do not have eyes for example, and yet they extend their tendrils in non random directions based on cues from what they touch, from the sun or that they are no longer receiving sun there used to, possibly even based on experience if they are cut back, though I'm not sure about that. They're good at their creeping, in ways that evidence and understanding, even if special purpose and crude, of the world around them. And so I imagine they would be far slower at understanding the same philosophical text, but it seems somehow unfair to assume that this means that they couldn't, or at least that something of similar but different design couldn't. Or that a better constructed AI couldn't. Or that maybe just an elephant, octopus, raven, or squirrel might not.

On some days, I am busy or foggy, on others highly focused. I suspect my processing speed has been different throughout my lifetime. I'm not positive that 2 year olds are stupider than 30-year-olds, just less adept at language. I have seen very young children manipulate computer tablets effectively to move from screen to screen and pursue highly sophisticated goals because the graphical language they employ is less clumsy than the text language we impose on other humans, suggesting perhaps that we waste years of our lives mastering a language that we could design better in order to integrate young humans earlier into our world. But also suggesting that even the choice of language in which your text is written might make a difference to the answer to the question of how long you have to ponder it in order to make sense of it. I would suggest controlling for that.

All to say that I don't think time is the right measure. It may also depend on the information being provided, whether it mostly matches what is expected or is highly dissonant and requires reflection. Sometimes when I'm reading to learn, I think I am merely scanning for things that are not in accordance with what I already know. So rather than time the quantity and question might be something related to dissonance of the information merging task to be accomplished, and then there's the question of what the architecture is into which you're merging.

Questions like this come up in computer science and are freely discussed. Is the medium into which you're storing capable of modification? If it is, it can be efficiently changed, but then you have to worry about side effects. Was someone depending on it to mean something that is now different? So it depends on the data structures you're using, and whether they are optimized for change or make assumptions that there will be no change.

It seems an open question whether human beings even agree internally on this. I've often wondered whether recalcitrance about new ideas is a consequence of one person having internally planned the organization of their brain for change and another person not having done so. That's not necessarily a primitive architectural difference. It might be something that we discover dynamically. It might be a random choice. It might be that we have different genes for this particular question, that nature is playing out of bet, like blood type, with some of us optimizing for change and some not. I like to think that personalities are in fact nature playing out such bets because it's interest to survival, not consistency, and it cannot be sure what's coming.

We obsessed about consistency in our knowledge, or at least in our meta knowledge, but our thought on such subjects is shorter than nature's. There is that messy reference to time, when the speed of nature's thought is surely different than ours. I am however hard-pressed to believe that nature has no intelligence to it given its vast complexity. It's hard to know. And it's not clear what knowing really is here. Clarke's third law, and all that.

"Adequacy" is another matter I've deliberately passed over for lack of space here

I hope these thoughts are helpful. I think about these matters a lot and rarely have any place to put them.

Time (ha) permitting, I'll try to listen to the podcast later, but I wanted to write this before I was biased by what it said.

Sorry too for any voice dictation artifacts.

#philosophy #thought #SpeedOfThought #intelligence #Descartes