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.

I definitely agree there. Part of this whole philosophy is that all problems can be solved, because anything that is physically possible, can be achieved with the requisite knowledge. So all suffering in the world, is merely the result of a lack of knowledge, and since we are all knowledge creators, there is no reason to be pessimistic. Optimism is not an attitude or a state of mind, it's a claim about reality. We live in a universe where problems can be solved with the requisite knowledge, and we exist as entities who can create that knowledge! Thus our reality is intrinsically optimistic! :)

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.

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.

I'll admit that we are infinitely ignorant, and endlessly fallible, and thus we can never be sure that we've reached the truth, regardless of what it is. But we do have our best explanations, and we must live and act as if those best explanations are true, because there is nothing else we can do. Epistemologies like Bayesianism are very popular today, but those never made much sense to me. We have the best most useful explanations until they are falsified, and even then they remain useful approximations, like Newton's Gravity being replaced by Einstein's. The reason Newton's is still a good approximation is because it was our best explanation at one time, and good explanations are good for a reason. They are falsifiable, and therefore testable, and they are hard to vary, and therefore fully explain the phenomena they reference. One day, Einstein's theory will also be replaced, or absorbed into Quantum theory, and one day even Quantum theory will be replaced. We will never have the final ultimate explanation, but we will always be able to create closer and closer approximations to the truth. Even if we did discover the final ultimate theory of something, we would never know it to be so.

This theory of the mind and universal explanation may indeed be wrong, but I would strongly suggest it is our current best explanation, and should be acted on as such. It can easily be falsified by discovering a completely new mode of explanation that is out of our reach, or by building an ASI that has a qualitative gain on us. I hope I'm alive for that because it'll be a very exciting time! :)

The proof is in the fundamental mechanism of explanation and computation itself. Explanations are just strings of statements. The difference between a simple explanation and the most complex explanation you could imagine, is just the length of their string of statements. So if you can understand anything that wasn't genetically programmed into you to understand, like it is for all animals, then you can understand anything. Some people are tricked into thinking animals can do this, but all they can do is mix and match whatever subroutines they were born with, some which look like a shadow of learning, but they never actually understand anything. The fact that we can understand something as obscure as quantum physics, means we can understand outside of our genetic programming, which means we can understand anything. To think otherwise, you'd be claiming that we can follow a string of statements up to some point, and then all of a sudden it just won't make sense anymore. But we know this isn't true. The proof to Fermat's Last Theorem was so long that no human could hold its string of statements in their mind at once. Yet people who are very interested and chose to learn that type of math, can read through page by page, and by the end, they understand the proof. At no point does the length of the explanation hinder their understanding. And if one day we do get to a length that's just too long, that's just a matter of increasing memory and processing power. We'll never need a qualitative increase, in fact there just isn't one to be had.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

He may have had better processing power and memory, but that wasn't the determining factor. It just so happened that his interests happened to be what they are, and he directed his intellectual creativity towards them. Using creativity to create knowledge isn't just about explicit knowledge, which is what we know him for, but also creating inexplicit knowledge, such as improving his creative output. A really good example is Ramanujan. Well known as one of the most "innately brilliant mathematicians to exist. And yes, his processing power and memory was surely high, but it was much more about the inexplicit knowledge he created about HOW to do math. He was able to do math in ways almost of all us cannot do, but not because we inherently cannot, but because we don't have the requisite knowledge to know how.

Most importantly, none of us are born with this knowledge, we create it, and all of us have the universal ability to create knowledge. We are born with some innate knowledge, such as the knowledge of how to learn language and things of that nature. But we can overcome our birthright regardless of which way it goes. For example, we are not born with the innate knowledge to understand quantum physics, yet we are able to learn; but we are born with the innate knowledge that very high places are dangerous, yet we can learn to overcome that fear and even go so far as to jump out of airplanes for fun with the learned knowledge that a parachute will save us. Regardless of what knowledge we are born with or without, we are universal, and can create and acquire whatever knowledge we want or need. Which again, is not to say that we will, but merely that we are able to.

Of course not, because a monkey doesn't have universal explanatory power. In fact, it has zero explanatory power. We're talking about a qualitative difference between us, where memory and processing power is merely quantitative. Now, it would definitely make it better than all the other monkeys, but it would still be qualitatively below us. My point is that there is nothing qualitatively above us, because universal is universal. You can't be universal plus one. So all that's left to improve is quantitative. Memory, processing power, and probably algorithmic efficiency.

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.

I totally grant that, but it's important to note that we still haven't even come close to hitting the limits of our understanding. Which is to say, any extra memory and processing power we've needed to understand anything, we've been very good at offloading to external systems, as with our computers.

Agreed. If a theory of consciousness doesn't explain subjectivity, then it's essentially worthless to me. I even prefer Tegmark's extremely vague, consciousness is just the strange texture information processing, or whatever he says. In fact I much prefer that, because at least it addresses subjectivity.

When people say it will be more intelligent, I'm not sure they understand what that means when talking about a universal intelligence such as our own. Once you hit universality, the only increases you have are in memory and processing power. That's not to say those advances won't have measurable effects. But this idea that it will just be beyond us is supernatural thinking. There is nothing an AGI could do or create that we couldn't understand or have explained to us. This comparison between us and chickens is totally misplaced. There is a qualitative difference between being strictly programmed by genes, and having universal explanatory power like us. AGI won't be a qualitative difference like that, merely quantitative. There are no qualitative leaps to make. Universal is universal. You can be more universal.

Given enough time and interest, we can already understand anything, as explanations are just strings of statements building one after the other. AGI will be able to think insanely fast and about many things at once, but it'll still be qualitatively similar to the computations our brains perform. There is only one way to compute, so it's not like AGI can use a new "type" of computation, and as I said, universal is universal. Imagine a human who can think a million times faster, remember everything perfectly, and think about a lot at once. That's ASI. It will certainly have major advantages, but it won't be incomprehensible.

Humans in the past would think we were using magic, it's true. But humans in the past didn't have the scientific revolution. If we met super advanced aliens that learned our language, there is no knowledge they had that they couldn't teach us, regardless of how complex. At the very most, they'd have to enhance our processing power and memory to teach the very most complex concepts, but that still doesn't require any qualitative change. People often use the example of planes inspired by birds, but taking a completely different route to get there. But that's not really a good example, because we still use the same laws of physics and the same principles to create lift, we just do it in a different way. In that same sense, AGI may be done in a different way, but it will still be the same principle of universality as our own minds.