[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The problem, as I'm sure you realized, is that you can't go up to an AGI researcher and say: "Build me an AI that includes spirit." Well, you can take that physical action. But if you say it one of the usual run of AGI researchers, one of two things will happen:I propose that *any* successful AGI design will be a design, instead of in reason, *in the technology of spirit*.Now, by "spirit", I don't mean the "Let's go pray to lunar crystals" snake oil-kind. I mean a real, all-encompasing, perspective on what it means to be. No doubt many AI'ers will claim spirit is irrelevant. No doubt some will claim that spirit is an emergent property of general intelligence. But I'm inclined (largely for rational reasons and partly for intuition) to disagree. Regarding the first point, I don't believe that spirit is irrelevant. Rather, I believe it is essential to intelligence. You can't have AGI without human-GI's ability to percieve spirit. Regarding the second point, I really doubt that spirit could be an emergent property of AGI. How can the whole emerge from the part unless the part already contains it?
1) The AGI researcher will say: "Spirit is poorly defined," not realizing that humans start out with an extremely poorly defined intuitive view of things like intelligence, spirit, emotion, reality, truth, et cetera, and that it is a necessary part of the job of creating AI to create clearly defined naturalistic views that completely, clearly, and satisfyingly encompass all these realms.
2) The AGI researcher will invent a spur-of-the moment definition for "spirit" which doesn't really match what you're interested in - it doesn't provide a detailed naturalistic view which, when you see it, is fully and satisfyingly identifiable with what you were interested in. But the AGI researcher will insist that the definition must embrace spirit for some reason or other, just as earlier AGI researchers insisted that search trees, three-layer neural networks, semantic nets, frames, agents, et cetera, carried within them all the complexity of the mind.
What you have is an intuition that something has been left undone in traditional models of AGI. You don't know what's missing - you just know that it is. This intuition tends to be missing in most AGI researchers. If they had the ability to tell when their theories were missing something critical they would not be launching AGI projects based on incomplete theories. There is a selection effect at work; people who know they don't understand the mind don't become AI researchers. But nonetheless, although you know something has been left undone, you don't really know *what* has been left undone. You can't describe it in enough detail to create it; if you could do that you would be a (true) AGI creator yourself. All you can do is insist that something is missing. And it is a sad fact that you will not get very far with this insistence - even though you are, for the record, correct.
I think I understand what you're calling "spirit". I think I understand it well enough to deliberately transfer it from humans, where it exists now, into another kind of rational-moral empirical regularity called a Friendly AI. I would say, from within that understanding, that you are correct in that spirit is not emergent... very little is, really. "Emergence" in AGI is mostly an excuse for not understanding things. If you don't understand something, you can't create it, and you certainly can't know in advance that it will "emerge".
In the physical natural sciences, where emergence really is the most useful paradigm for understanding most phenomena, you would be laughed out of the lecture hall if you showed a picture of the Sun's corona and insisted that you'd finally got the corona all figured out: "It's an emergent phenomenon of the Sun!" But of course this "explanation" tells us nothing about *how* the corona emerges from the Sun and whether we're likely to see an analogous phenomenon appear in a glass of water or a Bose-Einstein condensate. All that "emergence" says is that the explanation doesn't invoke an optimization process such as cognitive design or evolutionary adaptation. (Or to be specific, to say that A is naturally emergent from B is to say that given B, one does not need to postulate further information, or settings of physical variables, deriving from a cognitive or evolutionary optimization process, for A to result.)
"Spirit" isn't emergent, and isn't everywhere, and isn't a figment of the imagination, and isn't supernatural. "Spirit" refers to a real thing, with a real explanation; it's just that the explanation is very, very difficult.
--
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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