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[deleted] t1_ir26vdv wrote

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MurderByEgoDeath t1_ir27snz wrote

All those examples are nonsense though. Everyone CAN get a PhD from MIT and anything else. We all have that potential ability. Not everyone has the interest or creates the requisite knowledge to be able to do it, but we all have the potential. The people who can't (not counting mentally disabled), still could if they had the interest and learned the requisite knowledge. That does NOT mean everyone who tries will succeed. What it does mean is everyone who tries has a universal brain that can, in principle, succeed.

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[deleted] t1_ir2vuot wrote

[deleted]

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MurderByEgoDeath t1_ir35w4a wrote

It's amazing that you're the one saying that "average" people cannot, in principle, understand some things, yet you're calling me arrogant. What you're saying is absurd. It's a matter of interest, pure and simple. IQ is testing for very specific things, and those who are interested in those types of things, language, math, patterns, etc, score higher. Those who aren't interested in those things score lower, and tend to always score lower because they never become interested enough to learn them. Rarely is someone truly passionate about mathematics but unable to learn it because of some fundamental limitation. The only people that applies to are those who are cognitively limited in severe ways that prevent them from learning. The fact is, people you so easily dismiss as being innately stupid, just aren't interested in intellectual pursuits, which unfortunately is extremely common in our civilization. Even those with slight cognitive disabilities could get a PhD at MIT if they were extremely interested in doing so, and had the lifespan it would take to learn it at their much slower pace. Most people like that aren't interested at all in intellectual pursuits, because of culture, but also because, with it taking so much longer to learn things, it's just not fun.

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red75prime t1_ir48f51 wrote

It would make no practical difference whatsoever if an average person needs, say, 200 years to make their first non-trivial contribution to mathematics or physics. And you can't rule out such possibility from the first principles.

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pentin0 t1_irugtmm wrote

Some people seem to have a hatred for counterfactuals and/or abstraction. Let them live in the prison of their own emotions.

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sideways t1_ir39t47 wrote

Are you saying that there is a specific line that separates "limited intelligence" from "universal intelligence" and that "mentally disabled" people (and presumably animals) fall on the limited side?

Where do you see that border? Do you have any evidence to back that up?

Personally, I'd love to believe that I have universal intelligence but I'm skeptical since I doubt that a lower level of intelligence is able to even recognize a level of intelligence sufficiently beyond it.

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MurderByEgoDeath t1_ir3gubk wrote

Also, it's important to note, a lower qualitative level of intelligence can't recognize a greater intelligence. For example, my pet cat doesn't realize I'm smarter than it (in fact I have a feeling it assumes the opposite lol). But there is no higher qualitative level than us. That's really the main point, there is no higher than universal. There could be much greater quantitative intelligences than us, but we would definitely recognize that. It would just be an entity with massive creative ability, but they would still be able to explain everything to us, and even without them explaining it, if we took the time we could understand it ourselves.

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sideways t1_ir3l5kh wrote

That was exactly my point.

If you agree that a lower qualitative level of intelligence can't recognize a greater one, what makes you so confident that our level is "universal"?

Perhaps we can agree that a baby or small child, similar to animals, does not have universal intelligence. At what point do people "graduate" into it?

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MurderByEgoDeath t1_ir56hmf wrote

I mean there is clearly a cut off, and we clearly do "graduate" into it. But it's probably very very young. Definitely a baby already has it. They're constantly learning new things almost immediately, if not immediately, which means the graduation could possibly be in the womb. But this is an unsolved problem. We can be pretty sure that no other animals have it, or else they wouldn't be limited on what they can learn.

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MurderByEgoDeath t1_ir3bw0x wrote

So when I said "mentally disabled" in that context, I meant severely. As in, needs round the clock care. People with functional intellectual disabilities still have universal intelligence, it's just hindered to whatever extent. The evidence is the mechanism of explanation and computation. If someone can understand anything beyond the genetic knowledge they're born with, then there is nothing, in principle, preventing them from understanding anything else, regardless of its complexity. The difference between a very simple explanation, and the most complex explanation, is the length of the string of statements that explain it. As I said before, there are of course some explanations that require some base level of memory to understand. For example, to truly understand it you must be able to hold a certain level of information in your mind at once. I grant that it's possible a person with disabilities lacks that memory requirement, but even in those people, universality is still there. They have the qualitative requirement of universality, but lack the quantitative requirement of memory. I also grant that there could be explanations that would require quantitative increases that we are incapable of in our current state.

But in both cases, we can make quantitative increases with the requisite knowledge. In fact, we already do. We use computers all the time to gain major quantitative increases in processing power (speed) and memory. We even use simple paper and pen to do this. The proof to Fermat's Last Theorem is far far too long to hold in our mind at once, and even the mathematician who crafted it had to write it out as he went along, continuously going back to previous sections to revisit his conceptual building blocks. Yet it would be foolish to say he doesn't understand it just because he can't hold the entire thing in his mind at once. In the far future, we'll be able to add more and more processing power and memory to ourselves, perhaps even more efficient algorithms, but we'll never need to (or be able to) increase our intelligence qualitatively. Universal is infinite in it's capacity to understand, and you can't add to infinity. If you can, in principle, fully understand anything, then there's no way to fully understand anything in a bigger way. Anything means anything.

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sideways t1_ir3n4js wrote

Thanks for your explanation. That makes more sense. Doesn't David Deutsch take a similar position?

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MurderByEgoDeath t1_ir56oy1 wrote

He definitely does. If you're interested in more of this type of view, I highly recommend his book The Beginning of Infinity.

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Professional-Song216 t1_ir3ylau wrote

You took the words right out of my mouth, any conscious Intelligence would see itself as general intelligence because of the barriers it can’t look past. It seems it would be much more likely that there are a multitude of higher levels, each with their own emergent properties.

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beachmike t1_ir9uzlv wrote

Actually, no.

The vast majority of people are NOT capable of getting a PhD in the hard sciences, mathematics, or engineering from MIT.

Sorry to burst your bubble.

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MurderByEgoDeath t1_ir9vypz wrote

The vast majority of people don't have the knowledge needed, explicit and inexplicit, nor the interest, to get a PhD at MIT. But their brains and minds are absolutely capable of learning and retaining the necessary knowledge to do so. It's absurd to think otherwise, not to mention sad.

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beachmike t1_ir9zx1j wrote

You don't know what the hell you're talking about. I went to engineering school at University of Michigan. Classes such as advanced calculus and physical chemistry are HARD, and require far more than just the willingness and motivation to learn, or a good memory. The vast majority of people ***DO NOT*** have the intelligence to do well at those classes, and go on to even more difficult graduate school classes at a place like MIT.

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MurderByEgoDeath t1_ira2nof wrote

The arrogance is astounding. The vast majority of people you're talking about have absolutely no interest in studying in those fields. Those that try and fail, were unable to create/learn the inexplicit knowledge required to understand everything. That does NOT mean they cannot, in principle, create/learn that requisite knowledge, merely that they failed to do so. When someone makes an error, we never assume they are doomed to forever make that error. We can correct our errors. There is absolutely no difference between a simple error correction, and an extremely large complex error correction, except for scale. If someone can understand explanations for one thing, there is nothing, in principle, stopping them from understanding anything else. You're essentially advocating for supernatural thinking. That there is some special magical thing about complex explanations that means only certain people with special intelligence can understand. That is just not true. We are universal intelligences, and given enough time, anyone can understand anything. I readily admit that some people are quicker and more efficient at understanding, whether it be because of the inexplicit knowledge they create as young children, or because their memory and processing power is higher. But taking much longer to understand something is very very different from being in principle unable to ever understand something. Unless someone is severely disabled, they are universal in their ability to understand.

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beachmike t1_irq06qy wrote

The naivete is astounding. The detachment from reality is astounding. The reality is that individuals have vastly different levels of ability and intelligence in different fields. You said "We are universal intelligences, and given enough time, anyone can understand anything." ***That's absolute nonsense*** You believe, given enough time, someone with an IQ of 85 (about 1 standard deviation below the mean) can understand Advanced Calculus or Advance Physical Chemistry. That's absurd.

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MurderByEgoDeath t1_irqxkca wrote

IQ is a completely useless measure for this particular job. It measures acquired knowledge, explicit and inexplicit, memory, and processing power. Not universality. If someone is disabled to the point of lacking universality, then no, they couldn't learn Advanced Calculus. But yes, given enough time, and most importantly, actual interest, there's no reason someone couldn't learn it. The fact is, people like that have very very very little focus for things like that, because it's much more difficult for them and no fun at all. But if they for some reason became extremely interested in it and unlimited time, then yes, they could learn Advanced Calculus. There is nothing, in principle, stopping them.

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beachmike t1_irr0ks4 wrote

You're missing the forest for the trees. Again, you don't know what you're talking about. Someone with a below average IQ CANNOT do well in advanced science and math classes at MIT. It doesn't matter how much they desire to do well, study, or memorize.

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pentin0 t1_iruki8b wrote

His point is pretty simple to understand: there is no qualitative leap between the brains and minds of people who do well at MIT and the common healthy bloke. He isn't claiming that anyone could "do well" in those schools (because it would imply performing at the same level on a battery of standardized tests... which basically are a proxy for IQ testing. Since no one here is claiming that we all have the same IQ, your rebuke to his position would qualify as a strawman.

Regarding "good memory", it actually is pretty much the gist of it. It's not about having good long-term memory (the ability to "memorize" stuff) but sufficient working memory performance (the neocortex's distributed "RAM"); which has been observed to strongly correlate with IQ. To make it short, the main differences amongst humans that are relevant to the IQ distribution seem to be quantitative in nature (mostly, working memory performance, which itself is highly dependent on white matter integrity i.e. myelination of neuronal axons).

Notice that I didn't say "working memory size" because, as the research shows, these resources are scattered over such a sizeable portion of the brain that the relatively tiny differences in unit recruitment wouldn't explain much of the experimental data within the prevailing theories. So yeah, I'm talking about short-term memory encoding/decoding performance, here.

I know it's a hard pill to swallow but if you want to rely on "intelligence" to explain that phenomenon, then you'll lose your biggest opportunity to argue for qualitative factors as the main drivers of academic performance. In fact, working memory performance (which is much more straightforwardly quantitative than intelligence) is an even better predictor of academic success, especially at higher IQs (interestingly enough, the scenario that would be more relevant to this AGI/ASI debate).

Finally, since we're playing this game, I also went to an engineering school (studied AI), so don't expect your appeal to authority to work here. Let's be real about STEM classes: that shit might be "HARD" but it ain't witchcraft. It's also ironic that you used the driest and most clear-cut subjects as examples. It doesn't strengthen your point.

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beachmike t1_irv0pvu wrote

You OBVIOUSLY misunderstand the point I'm disputing. MurderByEgoDeath wrote: "Everyone CAN get a PhD from MIT and anything else. We all have that potential ability." Anyone with half a brain knows that is NOT TRUE. We DO NOT all have that potential ability. Not even close. I AM an authority on this subject because I've seen 1st hand people that were simply not smart enough to do well in undergraduate coursework at a top engineering and science university. You made several other incorrect arguments, but I'm not going to waste further time disputing them.

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