Why would intelligence even be a quantity thing? Just because we measure it with IQ tests, it does not mean it is a fungible commodity, the same way how giving a car 1 or 5 stars of safety on a crash test does not simply mean the some cars have more layers of pillows bolted on on that others: it is just a measure of the efficacy of entirely different technologies and processes used. Increasing intelligence probably means learning entirely new kinds and ways of reasoning and approaches to problems.
Why would external things influence intelligence esp. in a magical, fictional universe? Just make it a property of the immortal soul and whatnot and not related to brains and whatnot.
EDIT I googled the term intelligence explosion now and found this:
“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; ”
IMHO this is bogus because it sums up intelligence as one fungible commodity used for different things, like desining machines. But intelligence is simply a measure of various talents and skills. Machine-design skill is part of it, but neither does a machine-designing machine necessarily have intelligence in other fields, nor does a person who is an intelligent lawyer know anything about designing machines, nor would he be necessarily very good at learning it. Perhaps, if we understand intelligence as not knowledge but ability to learn. Which is highly suspicious because it assumes there is no innate, inborn, genetic, or unconscious/circumstantial knowledge used for designing machines or for learning anything else, to the extent that our ability to learn may be quite simply constrained by other kinds of knowledge and not a general information-sponging skill (to intelligently learn is not the same as to memorize, making sense of something requires pre-existing knowledge to relate it to).
If you see intelligence not as an information sponge (because that would be just a memory) but pre-existing knowledge that makes new knowledge learnable in an understood way, you have an NP complete problem of learning new and new information being slower and slower as it needs to be checked against and referenced against everything else, you get logarithmic growth of computing power and intelligence.
And all this our non-magical universe where we don’t even think intelligence is a function of immutable souls. But we don’t have wizards either.
because that trivially leads to intelligence explosion
To what? And why?
Why would intelligence even be a quantity thing? Just because we measure it with IQ tests, it does not mean it is a fungible commodity, the same way how giving a car 1 or 5 stars of safety on a crash test does not simply mean the some cars have more layers of pillows bolted on on that others: it is just a measure of the efficacy of entirely different technologies and processes used. Increasing intelligence probably means learning entirely new kinds and ways of reasoning and approaches to problems.
Why would external things influence intelligence esp. in a magical, fictional universe? Just make it a property of the immortal soul and whatnot and not related to brains and whatnot.
EDIT I googled the term intelligence explosion now and found this:
http://intelligenceexplosion.com/en/2011/preface/
“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; ”
IMHO this is bogus because it sums up intelligence as one fungible commodity used for different things, like desining machines. But intelligence is simply a measure of various talents and skills. Machine-design skill is part of it, but neither does a machine-designing machine necessarily have intelligence in other fields, nor does a person who is an intelligent lawyer know anything about designing machines, nor would he be necessarily very good at learning it. Perhaps, if we understand intelligence as not knowledge but ability to learn. Which is highly suspicious because it assumes there is no innate, inborn, genetic, or unconscious/circumstantial knowledge used for designing machines or for learning anything else, to the extent that our ability to learn may be quite simply constrained by other kinds of knowledge and not a general information-sponging skill (to intelligently learn is not the same as to memorize, making sense of something requires pre-existing knowledge to relate it to).
If you see intelligence not as an information sponge (because that would be just a memory) but pre-existing knowledge that makes new knowledge learnable in an understood way, you have an NP complete problem of learning new and new information being slower and slower as it needs to be checked against and referenced against everything else, you get logarithmic growth of computing power and intelligence.
And all this our non-magical universe where we don’t even think intelligence is a function of immutable souls. But we don’t have wizards either.
you might be interested in reading this
Excellent, thanks.