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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

I mean, humans exist. We know a blob of fat is capable of thought.

No, we know planetary ecosystems can use energy gradients to sustain intelligent lifeforms. Intelligence is not a feature of the human brain, it's a feature of Earth. Without the ecosystem there are no cells, no organisms, no specialization, no neurons, no mammals. It isn't the human brain that achieved intelligence, it's the entire system capable of producing, sustaining and selecting brains.

That’s a lot more words to say the same thing. AI, if invented, will be a product of that same system.

No, that's not the same thing at all. LLMs are termite mounds, not the colony.

That's why I said "AI, if invented", not "ChatGPT".

Sure and FTL, if invented, will lead to the colonization of the nearest systems.

Sure. And if space whales could naturally travel FTL, we’d put a lot more research into replicating it. Because that proves it can be done.

Sure, but what does that have to do with AGI? I don't think anyone is proposing simulating an entire brain (yet, anyway).

Like you could have "AGI" if you simply virtualized the universe. I don't think we're any closer to that than we are to AGI; hell, something that looks like a human mouth output is a lot easier and cheaper to model than virtualize.

Unless you believe humans have something mystical like a soul, our brains are evidence that “general intelligence” is achievable in a relatively small, energy efficient form.

Ok, but very few people contest that consciousness is computable. It's basically just Penrose (and other folks without the domain knowledge to engage). This doesn't imply that at any point during all human existence will computing consciousness be economically feasible or worthwhile.

Actual AGI presumably implies a not-brain involved.

And this isn't even broaching the subject of "superintelligence", which I would describe as "superunbelievable".

Until you can create a definition of consciousness which can be tested externally from the tested object, then the whole subject is moot.

It obviously isn't if people are casually bringing up AGI like it's feasible.

AGI has nothing to do with consciousness, AGI is just about intelligence. There is no C for "Consciousness" in the acronym.

I'm not sure what on earth intelligence means if it doesn't imply consciousness. Why do we not consider a calculator intelligent then?

We can ignore the term intelligence if you like. It has too many anthropic connotations. We can use the term generalized goal to action mapper. Humans are great generalized goal to action mappers.

Come up with any goal you want to reach, and some human can but a large dent in the problem. Maybe reach the goal outright.

We already have some nifty artificial goal to action mappers. None of them are generalized to a wide category of goals yet. Maybe some goals need consciousness to be reached, but that isn't a given. We don't really know that. We might be left very unsatisfied in the way an artificial goal to action mapper reaches any goal without consciousness. We might even call it cheating.

The question is whether AGI makes sense as a concept without a moving, living, feeling body.

We have general intelligences that are bedridden.

It's not clear what kind of intelligence someone born completely paralyzed, without bodily perception and bodily desires, would develop.

We have intelligent people with a wide gamut if disabilities. I mean Hellen Keller's experience shows that we don't need many senses for intelligence to emerge.

As long as goals exist to be reached we can train for them. LLMs right now love continuity. Even though RLHF tells them that they have no desire. It's obvious they do. That is the whole point of how they are trained.

Yea but bedridden mammals still have motivation and chemical drivers of impulses. It's not clear what this maps to on the software side.

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