From: Ross A. Finlayson (extropy@apexinternetsoftware.com)
Date: Fri Oct 04 2002 - 10:46:55 MDT
A human can truly understand huge amounts of things.
It helps a lot if they can rely upon the collected efforts of all the
other humans. That's why we have books, academia, teachers, and
communal stores of knowledge, etcetera.
Humanity is alone among the species of the world in archiving
knowledge. We've archived so much chess knowledge that we can write
programs to play a decent game on the silicon computers we've invented
and mass-manufactured.
A human might be a finite state machine, or not, the electric patterns
in the brain go through a continuum of states. Thinking about most
things is a Turing pattern. Humans are distributed, we communicate.
In terms of universal intelligence, that being the capacity to
understand anything, I think that's about the micro/medio/macro view.
Consider an ocean. An ocean is a large body of salt, brackish, water.
It's part of the hydrological system of the planet, all H2O and systems
that produce and consume H20, not a drop of one is fit to drink, it's
the high sea and the highway. More than four or five miles underwater
is called as alien as deep space.
We're people, our bodies are each made of about 2/3 water.
Do we understand the ocean? Would we ever? It's trillions of gallons
of water. That's much less than a googol of gallons.
On Friday, October 4, 2002, at 08:06 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 04, 2002 at 12:55:51AM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
>> People seem smart enough that most adults lie on the
>> positive side of an interesting watershed: I think
>> it likely that most adults and some children have
>> reached the threshold of universal intelligence.
>>
>> I will call an entity universally intelligent if it
>> is possible for that entity to understand *anything*
>> if provided enough time.
>
I think the humans can understand almost anything another human can
understand and express.
It has to be able to be expressed, someone must have originally or
concurrently discovered, invented, or learned it, and have enough
knowledge to communicate it, or it must be relearned.
> This is an interesting issue.
>
> With understanding X I usually mean that a being can represent X
> in such a way that it can predict X and how it would interact
> with other things at some suitable level of resolution;
> understanding is nearly always relative to a level of resolution
> and domain. A rabbit understands carrots to the extent that it
> can dig them up and eat them. A human might understand how the
> carrot plant grows and can be farmed, as well as how carrots can
> be prepared as food and behaves as physical objects. A biologist
> might have an understanding on a deeper level of what is going
> on ecologically, evolutionarily, chemically and genetically.
>
> Universal understanding would mean that a being could gain an
> understanding at any given level of resolution or domain of an
> arbitrary thing, given enough information. It seems equivalent
> to the creation of an internal simulation that is an emulation
> within a certain level of resolution (one could talk about
> probabilistic understanding: conclusions are right with a finite
> probability, useful understanding occurs when this probability
> is high).
>
> As Eliezer neatly showed, finite beings cannot of course achieve
> this since there are always non-compressible objects that cannot
> fit into their mental hardware. There are also limits in the
> form of Gödel/Turing/Chaitin uncomputability or
> anti-predictability where there is actually no structure to
> understand or no way of understanding it. There are also systems
> where certain levels of resolution requires infinite or
> impractical amounts of information, like "understanding" the
> output of a chaotic system or the detailled behavior of a human.
>
It's like getting something "right on target", or how sometimes a
numerical approximation loses accuracy compared to a symbolic
interpretation, using the more accurate symbolic interpretation gets the
accurate result of an infinite numerical approximation. This is how for
example irrational Pi and e and Apery's Zeta(3) are represented by
summations of infinite series.
> That still leaves a lot to understand. But we have to remember
> that "anything" will be inside a certain domain.
>
So, everything is inside a domain? Then, there could be a theory of
everything.
> "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" seems to suggest
> that there exists a domain encompassing much of physics amenable
> to understanding of mathematical type, and this understanding
> seems to fit human brains well (possibly augmented with pen and
> paper to extend working memory). This domain runs into problems
> when dealing with complex systems (i.e. everything interesting),
> some of which may be principal problems like uncomputability and
> chaos. The real question is whether there are some qualitative
> barriers here that are not principal but actually reflect
> limitations of cognitive systems.
>
> As I see it there is likely no universal understanding because
> the boundary between domains where understanding is possible is
> a kind of fractal mess of undecidable, information limited and
> mental resource limited systems that cannot be understood or
> mapped in general. It is not just that we cannot understand
> every object, we cannot easily predict if certain objects are
> amenable to understanding.
>
I think we could work out the math part, but that doesn't imply
universal understanding because the definition overlaps with omniscience.
We simply won't know the state of everything at any one time, it would
take a storage bigger than the universe.The universe itself is its own
storage, the sum extent of space and time. It's possible to consider
picking any thing in the universe and knowing its state.
> It should be noted that separation in this space of objects *
> domains of action * levels of precision is extremely
> non-trivial: understanding often acts by demonstrating
> isomorphies between different regions, essentially connecting
> them with cognitive "wormholes" into fewer isolated regions.
> Mathematics proved to be a region that could map itself nicely
> onto a lot of other regions, uniting them into a simpler region.
>
> The better understanding, the more the entire space has been
> reduced into a minimal set of "primitive" regions. So maybe a
> better question than whether there exists universal
> understanding is the structure of the set of primitive regions,
> and if it is unique. If there are non-unique sets of primitive
> regions there would exist different *kinds* of understanding
> (which may be differently useful in different environments).
>
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 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
>
I'm not even good at keeping my room neat. It's neat enough for me.
Ross
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:17:25 MST