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Comment by mhl47 | Hacker News Reader

How do you arrive at the statement that a cavemen would have the same intelligence as a human today? Intelligence is surely not usually defined as the cognitive potential at birth but as the current capability. And the knowledge an average human has today through education surely factors into that.

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Your attempt to commingle intelligence and knowledge is not needed to support your initial question. The original statement that a caveman 200K years ago would have the same intelligence as a modern human was blankly asserted without any supporting evidence, and so it is valid to simply question the claim. You do not need to give a counterclaim, as that is unnecessarily shifting the burden of proof.

Knowledge is a thing you can use intelligence on, but not a component of intelligence itself.

The knowledge that everything is made out of atoms/molecules however makes it much easier to reason about your environment. And based on this knowledge you also learn algorithms, how to solve problems etc. I dont think its possible to completely separate knowledge from intelligence.

But an intelligent being could learn that, do you think they become more intelligent if you tell them things are made out of atoms? To me the answer is very simple, no they don't become more intelligent.

There’s a lot of research out there about the general flexibility of the brain to adapt to whatever stimulus you pump into it. For example taxi cab drivers have larger areas in their hippocampus dedicated to place cells relative to the general population [1]. There’s also all kinds of work studying general flexibility of the brain in response to novel stimulus like the visual cortex of blind people being dedicated to auditory processing [2 is a broad review]. I guess you could argue that the ability to be flexible is intelligence but the timescales over which a brain functionally changes is longer than a general day to day flexibility. Maybe some brains come into an initial state that’s more predisposed to the set of properties that we deem as “intelligence” but development is so stimulus dependent that I think this definition of a fixed intelligence is functionally meaningless. There are definitely differences in what you can learn as you age but anyone stating we have any causal measure of innate intelligence is claiming far more than we actually have evidence for. We have far more evidence to suggest that we can train at least the appearance and usage of “intelligence”. After all no one is born capable of formal logical reasoning and it must be taught [3,4 kind of weak citations foe this claim but there’s a lot to suggest this that I don’t feel like digging up]

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17024677/ [2] https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur... [3] https://psychologyfor.com/wason-selection-task-what-it-is-an... [4] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14794802.2021.1...

Would you also say that you cannot "train" intelligence?

I would agree that generally, purely acquiring knowledge does not increase intelligence. But I would also argue that intelligence (ie your raw "processing power") can be trained, a bit like a muscle. And acquiring and processing new knowledge is one of the main ways we train that "muscle".

There's lots of examples where your definition of intelligence (intelligence == raw processing power) either doesn't make sense, or is so narrow that it becomes a meaningless concept. Let's consider feral children (ie humans growing up among animals with no human contact). Apparently they are unable or have trouble learning a human language. There's a theory that there's a critical period after which we are unable to learn certain things. Wouldn't the "ability to learn a language" be considered intelligence? Would you therefore consider a young child more intelligent than any adult?

And to answer your question, whether learning about atoms makes you more intelligent: Yes, probably. It will create some kind of connections in your brain that didn't exist before. It's a piece of knowledge that can be drawn upon for all of your thinking and it's a piece of knowledge that most humans would not figure out on their own. By basically any sensible definition of intelligence, yes it does improve your intelligence.

And by that definition, large language models are intelligent. They have connections where they draw upon

Yes, intelligence can be influenced by training(and other things).

Separating knowledge from intelligence is not a given.

You can give an intelligent being knowledge but you can't give a book intelligence. So I think its easy to separate knowledge from intelligence.

The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me. I consider the act of knowing to be embodied, it is something a person has learned to do and has control over.

Is that how you approach PDF files? Do you feel it in your bones that these flows of bytes are knowing?

> The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me

I didn't say the book knows things, but everyone can agree that books has knowledge in them. Hence something possessing knowledge doesn't make it intelligent.

For example, when ancient libraries were burnt those civilizations lost a lot of knowledge. Those books possessed knowledge, it isn't a hard concept to understand. Those civilizations didn't lose intelligence, the smart humans were still there, they just lost knowledge.

Would you consider taking a dump and then butchering an animal and then eating without washing your hands first, to be an issue of intelligence or knowledge?

The whole thing about washing hands comes from (some approximation of) germ theory of illness, and in practice, it actually just boils down to stories of other people practicing hygiene. So if one's answer here isn't "knowledge", it needs some serious justification.

Expanding that: can you think of things that are "intelligence" that cannot be reduced like this to knowledge (or combination of knowledge + social expectations)?

I think in some sense, separating knowledge and intelligence is as dumb a confusion of ideas as separating "code" and "data" (doesn't stop half the industry from believing them to be distinct thing). But I'm willing to agree that hardware-wise, humans today and those from 10 000 years ago, are roughly the same, so if you teleported an infant from 8000 BC to this day, they'd learn to function in our times without a problem. Adults are another thing, brains aren't CPUs, the distinction between software and hardware isn't as clear in vivo as it is in silico, due to properties of the computational medium.

hygiene is set of rules that one learns - it is knowledge

your brain hearing, comprehending and following those rules - that is intelligence

why do you keep confusing CPU speed/isa and contents of SSD? and arguing that it's the same thing?

Because comparing the human brain and the way it is thinking and seeing and interacting to/with the world to physical/mechanical things like CPU/SSD brings with it huge abstraction gaps, to the point of making the comparison null.

except we aren't talking about internals of the brain - we are talking about definitions of the words, which are very different

The definitions of the words are contingent on human experience, even more so than "code" are "data" where we try to be more mechanistic, and still most people make the mistake of thinking they're distinct categories (spoiler: they're not; whether something is "code" or "data" depends entirely on your perspective).

If we want to draw computing device analogies, then the brain is an FPGA that is continuously reconfiguring itself throughout its runtime.

"I didn't say the book knows things, but everyone can agree that books has knowledge in them."

I disagree with this. I also disagree that civilisations are knowing, since they are historical fictions. It's like saying that Superman is.

What are your arguments?

I think the core idea is that if a baby with "caveman genetics" so to speak were to be born today, they could achieve similar intellectual results to the (average?) rest of the population. At least that's how I interpret it.

It's even sillier than that. You can look at populations in the modern world and see there are huge differences in intelligence due to various factors such as cousin marriage and nutrition.

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