“If intelligence is an ability to act in the world, if it refer to some external reality, and if this reality is almost infinitely malleable, then intelligence cannot be purely innate or genetic.”
This misses the No Free Lunch theorems, which state that there is no learning system that outperforms any other in general. Yes, full human intelligence, AI superintelligence, earthworms and selecting actions at random are just as good. The trick is “in general”, since that covers an infinity of patternless possible worlds. Worlds with (to us) learnable and understandable patterns is a minuscule minority.
Clearly intelligence needs input from an external world. But it has been shaped by millions of years of evolution within a particular kind of world, and there is quite a bit of information in our genes about how to make a brain that can process this kind of world. Beings that are born with perfectly general brains will not learn how to deal with the world until it is too late, compared to beings with more specialised brains. This is actually a source of our biases, since the built in biases that reduce learning time may not be perfectly aligned with the real world or the new world we currently inhabit.
Conversely, it should not be strange that there is variation in the genes that enable our brains to form and that this produces different biases, different levels of adaptivity and different “styles” of brains. Just think of trying to set the optimal learning rate, discount rate and exploration rate of reinforcement agents.
I agree with Watson that it would be very surprising if intelligence-related genes were perfectly equally distributed. At the same time there are a lot of traits that are surprisingly equally distributed. At the same time, the interplay between genetics, environment, schooling, nutrition, rich and complex societies etc. is complex and accounts for a lot. We honestly do not understand it and its limits at present.
“If intelligence is an ability to act in the world, if it refer to some external reality, and if this reality is almost infinitely malleable, then intelligence cannot be purely innate or genetic.”
This misses the No Free Lunch theorems, which state that there is no learning system that outperforms any other in general. Yes, full human intelligence, AI superintelligence, earthworms and selecting actions at random are just as good. The trick is “in general”, since that covers an infinity of patternless possible worlds. Worlds with (to us) learnable and understandable patterns is a minuscule minority.
Clearly intelligence needs input from an external world. But it has been shaped by millions of years of evolution within a particular kind of world, and there is quite a bit of information in our genes about how to make a brain that can process this kind of world. Beings that are born with perfectly general brains will not learn how to deal with the world until it is too late, compared to beings with more specialised brains. This is actually a source of our biases, since the built in biases that reduce learning time may not be perfectly aligned with the real world or the new world we currently inhabit.
Conversely, it should not be strange that there is variation in the genes that enable our brains to form and that this produces different biases, different levels of adaptivity and different “styles” of brains. Just think of trying to set the optimal learning rate, discount rate and exploration rate of reinforcement agents.
I agree with Watson that it would be very surprising if intelligence-related genes were perfectly equally distributed. At the same time there are a lot of traits that are surprisingly equally distributed. At the same time, the interplay between genetics, environment, schooling, nutrition, rich and complex societies etc. is complex and accounts for a lot. We honestly do not understand it and its limits at present.