I think a human cognitive bias is to think that something about which we have a coherent idea is coherent in implementation. As an engineer, I think that this is a bias that is clearly wrong. A well designed smartphone, especially an Apple product, appears quite coherent, it appears “right.” There is a consistency to its UI, to what a swipe or a back press or whatever does in one app and in another. The consistency in how it appears causes the human to think the consistency must be built in, that the design of such a consistent thing must be somehow SIMPLER than the design of a complex and inconsistent thing.
But it is not. It is much easier to design a user interface which is a mess, which has a radio button to enter one mode, but a drop down menu for another and a spinner for yet another. It is pure high-level skull sweat that removes these inconsistencies and builds a system which appears consistent at a high level.
And so it is with our brains and our intelligence. What we see and what we hear and what we carry around as an internal model of the world all agree not because there is some single simple neurology that gives that result, but because our brains are complex and have been fine tuned over millions of years to give agreement between these various functionalities, giving the appearance of a simple consistency, but through the agency of a complex tweaking of different features of hearing and vision and memory.
And in the midst of all this, we extend our brains beyond what they ever evolved for, to semiconductor chip design, the proof of mathematical theorems, the writing of symphonies and sonnets. Giving the appearance that there is some simple thing one might call “General Intelligence” of which we have a few large dollops.
But I think what we really have is a complex mix of separate analytical tools, and that it turns out that these tools span so many different ways of thinking about things that they can successfully be adapted to all sorts of things they were not originally designed (evolved) for. That is, they are a bunch of hacks, but not necessarily a complete set of hacks, if any such an idea as a complete set making up a general intelligence could even be defined.
So we use the tools we have, and enough animals die that we stay fed, and enough chips work that we have smart phones, and so we think we possess some “simple” general intelligence.
Or put concisely, what Baughn says in his comment at this same level.
It might imply that consciousness is not very highly related to what we think of as high general intelligence. That consciousness is something else.
Then, what would that make homo sapiens who can hunt wild beasts in savannah and design semiconductor chips if not generally intelligent?
I think a human cognitive bias is to think that something about which we have a coherent idea is coherent in implementation. As an engineer, I think that this is a bias that is clearly wrong. A well designed smartphone, especially an Apple product, appears quite coherent, it appears “right.” There is a consistency to its UI, to what a swipe or a back press or whatever does in one app and in another. The consistency in how it appears causes the human to think the consistency must be built in, that the design of such a consistent thing must be somehow SIMPLER than the design of a complex and inconsistent thing.
But it is not. It is much easier to design a user interface which is a mess, which has a radio button to enter one mode, but a drop down menu for another and a spinner for yet another. It is pure high-level skull sweat that removes these inconsistencies and builds a system which appears consistent at a high level.
And so it is with our brains and our intelligence. What we see and what we hear and what we carry around as an internal model of the world all agree not because there is some single simple neurology that gives that result, but because our brains are complex and have been fine tuned over millions of years to give agreement between these various functionalities, giving the appearance of a simple consistency, but through the agency of a complex tweaking of different features of hearing and vision and memory.
And in the midst of all this, we extend our brains beyond what they ever evolved for, to semiconductor chip design, the proof of mathematical theorems, the writing of symphonies and sonnets. Giving the appearance that there is some simple thing one might call “General Intelligence” of which we have a few large dollops.
But I think what we really have is a complex mix of separate analytical tools, and that it turns out that these tools span so many different ways of thinking about things that they can successfully be adapted to all sorts of things they were not originally designed (evolved) for. That is, they are a bunch of hacks, but not necessarily a complete set of hacks, if any such an idea as a complete set making up a general intelligence could even be defined.
So we use the tools we have, and enough animals die that we stay fed, and enough chips work that we have smart phones, and so we think we possess some “simple” general intelligence.
Or put concisely, what Baughn says in his comment at this same level.
A bundle of widely but not universally applicable tricks?