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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

Why don't you think an "AI based on elegant intelligence" (according to your own definition) will happen? Do you suppose it's merely a problem of engineering and complexity, i.e. the human race is likely to become extinct before we will figure out how the human brain works? Or do you suppose there is some more fundamental reason why only humans (and perhaps other intelligent organic beings) can exhibit this type of intelligence?

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Both (separately though, the two answers are not related even though I put them in one post - I'm allowed to have more than one thought about something).

We just don't understand intelligence (not the brain, intelligence) well enough to duplicate it, never mind improve it.

And I don't think we ever will because to understand something complex you have to be more complex than that thing, but by definition we can not be more complex than ourself - so understanding our own intelligence will always be beyond us.

That's the objective part.

The subjective part is that I personally believe that intelligence is not physical. The brain mediates it, but the source is elsewhere.

The soul maybe, or that we are really game characters in an MMOG.

I don't see any clear reason to believe your first claim. Humans can and do create things that are far too complex for any one human to be able to conceive of or comprehend. Most large engineering projects are good examples of this, but also even larger systems like governments and markets. You can certainly argue that even these large systems are less complex than human intelligence, but even if a human can only understand things 1% as complex as his own intelligence, I see no compelling reason to believe that thousands of humans can't develop something more complex than one human's intelligence.

As for your second claim, well, I suppose it is subjective, though I would prefer the term "speculative."

The source of all real insight is, of course, divinity. True understanding is not generated by the brain but rather received in the Plexus Solaris and then works it's way up to the brain, where it is turned into action, language or memory.

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