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Comment by akomtu | Hacker News Reader

People innately believe that intelligence isn't an algorithm. When a complex problem presents itself for the first time, people think "oh, this must be so complex that no algorithm can solve it, only AI," and when an algorithmic solution is found, people realise that the problem isn't that complex.

Indeed, if AI was an algorithm, imagine what would it feel like to be like one: at every step of your thinking process you are dragged by the iron hand of the algorithm, you have no agency in decision making, for every step is pre-determined already, and you're left the role of an observer. The algorithm leaves no room for intelligence.

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Is that not the human experience? I have no “agency” over the next thought to pop into my head. I “feel” like I can choose where to focus attention, but that too is a predictable outcome arising from the integration of my embryology, memories, and recently reinforced behaviors. “I” am merely an observer of my own mental state.

But that is an uncomfortable idea for most people.

While technically true, the difference is that we don't know in details how that process works and we can't predict it.

There is not much of a difference in considering it deterministic or not, because we can't determine it.

> and we can't predict it

Has there been a serious effort to, using something that might be capable of doing so, like neural nets?

If this was true, you could lay back relaxed and watch where your brain takes you. But we experience life as a never ending stream of choices, usually between what's easy and what's right, and pursuing the right choice takes a constant effort. We are presented with problems and have to figure out solutions on our own, with no guarantees of success.

This "I'm just an observer" idea may be true at some higher level, if you're a monk on the threshold of nirvana, but for common folk this mindset leads nowhere.

> pursuing the right choice

I don't agree with this framing. A person's opinion of what a "good" or "right" outcome is is one of the inputs to the algorithm.

When you decide to put in less effort it's affecting the algorithm because the weight of the high-effort outcome is reduced.

Or, as Mistress Weatherwx put it,

The trouble is, you see, that if you do know Right from Wrong you can't choose Wrong. You just can't do it and live.

The „making choices“ could just be an illusion where it’s already clear from the inputs what you’re going to do. You rejecting determinism could already be determined and you couldn’t even choose to believe it. That’s not falsifiable of course, but your point doesn’t really contradict the idea of determinism due to the possibility.

Sapolsky wrote a 500 page rebuttal to this idea in Determined.

It is quite a convincing book and maybe even a dangerous book in a sense.

The other option you don't mention is "algorithms can solve it, but they do something different to what humans do". That's what happened with Go and Chess, for example.

I agree with you that people don't consider intelligence as fundamentally algorithmic. But I think the appeal of algorithmic intelligence comes from the fact that a lot of intelligent behaviours (strategic thinking, decomposing a problem into subproblems, planning) are (or at least feel) algorithmic.

it mostly depends on one's definition of an algorithm.

our brain is mostly scatter-gather with fuzzy pattern matching that loops back on itself. which is a nice loop, inputs feeding in, found patterns producing outputs and then it echoes back for some learning.

but of course most of it is noise, filtered out, most of the output is also just routine, most of the learning happens early when there's a big difference between the "echo" and the following inputs.

it's a huge self-referential state-machine. of course running it feels normal, because we have an internal model of ourselves, we ran it too, and if things are going as usual, it's giving the usual output. (and when the "baseline" is out of whack then even we have the psychopathologies.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rxXoiQyQVc

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