Even talking about intelligence as optimization seems questionable, as the majority of intelligent behaviors don’t involve optimization at all. Quite the opposite, in fact—we’re able to set our own goals, and experience a “reward sensation” when we accomplish them. If we optimized our ability to induce a reward in ourselves, we would very quickly decay into setting trivially easy goals and basking in the glow of our success.
As it is, we get bored and distracted. When humans tell stories, which seems to be a fundamental part of our psychology and is possibly one of the very few things that are uniquely human, we don’t optimize them. We elaborate upon them, making them ‘interesting’. Creativity isn’t an optimization process, although its results can be evaluated by optimization-seeking processes with their own goals.
Are we sure that we’re not treating intelligence as optimization simply because optimization is something that we already have a great deal of mathematical work on?
Even talking about intelligence as optimization seems questionable, as the majority of intelligent behaviors don’t involve optimization at all. Quite the opposite, in fact—we’re able to set our own goals, and experience a “reward sensation” when we accomplish them. If we optimized our ability to induce a reward in ourselves, we would very quickly decay into setting trivially easy goals and basking in the glow of our success.
As it is, we get bored and distracted. When humans tell stories, which seems to be a fundamental part of our psychology and is possibly one of the very few things that are uniquely human, we don’t optimize them. We elaborate upon them, making them ‘interesting’. Creativity isn’t an optimization process, although its results can be evaluated by optimization-seeking processes with their own goals.
Are we sure that we’re not treating intelligence as optimization simply because optimization is something that we already have a great deal of mathematical work on?