From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sat Dec 21 2002 - 09:17:57 MST
Actually, this is related to an issue I have been thinking about a lot:
How complex is the terrestrial environment really? The whole race-IQ
issue seems to hinge on the assumption that some environments are less
complex and less intelligence is needed to survive. But we humans tend
to *generate environment* in our daily activities - we clothe ourselves,
build, make tools, construct elaborate social and cultural structures
that can be ridiculously complex even when the surrounding land is just
flat plain. This effect seem to overshadow any effect of the environment
when it comes to general intelligence.
My own interest is more related to the issue of learning. What is the
distribution of importance during everyday life? Clearly not every
experience is equally important, but how are their relative importance
(perhaps measured in terms of mortality or fitness) distributed? Is it
an exponential with a long tail, some kind of normal distribution or
something else? And can we somehow determine this distribution?
If we know the complexity of an environment (or what *kind* of
complexity it is - living in white noise land is different from the
Amazonas or living on the net) and the distribution of importance it
becomes possible to sketch the optimal learning and thinking systems for
that environment. I think.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:58:49 MST