Eric,
I hear what you say, but I do have principled reasons for characterizing
it the way I did: as far as I can make out there is a difference
between the 'thinking' component of an intelligence and the 'motivation'
component, and that difference allows us to talk about manipulating and
controlling the things that give us fun. Thinking is fun, but not
because of something intrinsic to the thinking itself, but because of
the external motivational system.
What that means is that if you build a system with the ability to do
vastly more complex forms of thinking, that fact by itself does not have
any implications for whether it is more 'enjoyable' or 'satisfying' to
the system to engage in the the more complex form of thinking. What
determines the satisfaction would be the way the more complex form of
thinking affected the motivational system (if at all).
An analogy. Suppose I could insert a module in my brain right now to
make me the most effective crossword puzzle solver in the world. Would
that ability make me want to crosswords all the time? Would it be so
satisfying that I would *never* consider extracting that crossword
ability from my brain in the future? Would I ever cast around for other
new skills that might give me pleasure? And if I did go looking for new
skills to acquire, wouldn't that mean that in some sense I was not quite
as satisfied with the pleasure I got from the crosswords?
What I am trying to do in this thought experiment is to drive a wedge
between the idea of [the pleasure I get from doing intellectual task X]
and [intellectual task X].
If you rephrased your suggestion to say that once I had experienced the
possibility of changing the forms of pleasure that I am capable of
experiencing, I would never want to go back to a state in which I had no
options for changing my forms of pleasure, then I would completely agree
with that. [I wonder why?]
But if you were to claim that once I experienced superintelligent
intellectual capacity, I would never want to spend any time existing
inside a lesser form of mind, that seems somehow unbelievable ... if
only because in my present state I *am* curious about the possibility of
spending time with less knowledge than I have now (e.g. being a tiger
for a while, or being Isaac Newton before 1660), and it would seem that
your hypothesis would say that I would not want that.
Richard Loosemore
Eric B. Ramsay wrote:
Actually Richard, these are the things you imagine you would like to do
given your current level of intelligence. I suspect very much that the
moment you went super intelligent there would be a paradigm change in
what you consider "fun".
Eric
*/Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>/* wrote:
Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 03:54:50AM -0400, Randall wrote:
>
>> I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone who had seen the
>> elephant would choose to go back to being Mundane.
>
> The question is also whether they could, if they wanted to.
> A neanderthal wouldn't function well in today's society,
> and anything lesser would run a good chance of becoming roadkill.
>
>> If I could flip a switch and increase my _g_ by two orders of
>> magnitude, I'd never flip that switch back. Why would anybody?
>
> I wouldn't. But I wouldn't max out the knob immediately, either.
> I would just go for a slow, sustainable growth, at least as long
> nobody else is rushing ahead.
>
[META COMMENT. Is it my imagination, or have some funny things have
been happening to the AGI and/or Singularity lists recently... e.g.
delivery of messages as if they were offlist?]
I think you are looking at the possibilities through far to narrow a
prism.
Consider. Would it be interesting to find what it is like to be, say, a
tiger? A whale? A dolphin? I can think of ways to temporarily get
transferred into the form of any reasonably high-level animal, then
come
back again to human later, with at least some memories of what it was
like to have been in that state.
In a future in which all these things are possible, why would people
not
be interested in having this kind of fun?
Now imagine the possibility of becoming superintelligent. That could
get kind of heavy after a while. I do not necessarily think that I want
to know about all of the science in human history, for example, to such
a deep extent that it would be as if I had been teaching it for
centuries, and was bored with every last bit of it. Would you?
I would want to have fun. And the big part of having fun would be
finding out new stuff.
So, yes, I would want to become superintelligent occasionally, but it
seems to me that the more intelligent I become, the more I know about
complex problems I cannot fix, and the more that frustrates me. That's
not fun after a while. Sometimes it would be nice to go back to just
being a kid for a while.
Then there is the possibility of recreating historical situations. I
would like to be able to be one of the people who was around when none
of modern science existed, just so I could try to discover that stuff
when it was new. To do that I would have to reduce my current knowledge
by putting it on ice for a while.
And on and on.... I can think of vast numbers of reasons not to do the
boring thing of just trying to get into a high-intelligence brain.
It's not the destination, folks, its the journey.
Richard Loosemore
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