Re: Why super-human intelligence would be equivalent to precognition

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sun Jul 07 2002 - 02:09:06 MDT


On Sat, Jul 06, 2002 at 08:06:16PM -0700, Sehkenenra wrote:
>
> Marc's model sounds an awful lot like that of Jean Gebser (The Ever-Present
> Origin, 1966), who similarly posited a "dimensional" model of consciousness
> working it's way through three dimensions (with a possible fourth and beyond
> in the offing) through the evolution of human history. While interesting, I
> don't think that Gebser's model is nearly as helpful as the work of Clare
> Graves or the later developments of Spiral Dynamics (although the current
> website isn't the most pleasant thing in the world to look at
> (http://www.spiraldynamics.com/), it still presents the model pretty well.

Well, these models have the problem of trying to explain
*everything* - both human human history and individual development.
Theories of everything in psychology tend to be very broad and hard
to test. Grave's model seems to be somewhere in between Ericksonian
psychology and the Leary-Wilson circuit models (and the website
coloring is biasing it towards the latter :-) The core ideas are
of course fairly uncontroversial: we build on top of old
systems/old ways of thinking, new levels are qualitative and not
just quantitative improvements and so on.

What I like about Marc's model is that it doesn't try to explain
everything, but instead just looks at cognition as a prediction
problem. This is very close to what is being done in statistical
learning theory and some forms of connectionism. The nice thing
about this approach is that it is not tied to a specific organism;
the above psychological theories/models are highly contingent upon
the specific properties of humans, and would not be applicable to
AIs or hive intelligent insectoid aliens.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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