I guess that intuitively, argument goes like this: 1) economy is more powerful than individual agents, it allows to increase the power of intelligence in individual agents; 2) therefore, economy has an intelligence-increasing potency; 3) so, we can take stupid agents, apply the economy potion to them and get powerful intelligence as a result.
But it's easy to see how this kind of argument may be invalid. Adding gasoline to the fire makes the fire stronger, more "firey", therefore it contains fire-potency, therefore applying sufficient amount of gasoline to water, which is originally much less firey, will create as strong fire as necessary. Doesn't work? You didn't add enough gasoline, is all. When you consider a system as complex as a human economy, you can't just take one aspect apart from all other aspects, and declare it the essence of the process. There are too many alternatives, you can't win this lottery blindfolded. Some small number of aspects may in fact be the essence, but you can't find these elements before you factored out other functional parts of the process and showed that your model works without them. You can't ignore the spark, this *obviously* insignificant tiny fluke in the blazing river of fire, and accept only the gasoline into your model. Why are you *obviously* allowed to ignore human intelligence, the most powerful force in the known universe, in your model of what makes human economy intelligent? This argument is void, it must not move you, you must not rationalize your thinking by it. If you are to know the conclusion to be valid, there needs to be a valid force to convince you. Now, consider evolution. Evolution is understood, and technically so. It has *no* mind. It has no agents, no goals, no desires. It doesn't think its designs, it is a regularity in the way designs develop, a property of physics that explains why complicated functional systems such as eye are *likely* to develop. Its efficiency comes from incremental improvement and massively parallel exploration. It is a society of simple mechanisms, with no purposeful design. The evolutionary process is woven from the threads of individual replicators, an algorithm steadily converting these threads into the new forms. This process is blind to the structure of the threads, it sees not beauty or suffering, speed or strength, it remains the same irrespective of the vehicles weaving the evolutionary regularity, unless the rules of the game fundamentally change. It doesn't matter for evolution whether a rat is smarter than the butterfly. Intelligence is irrelevant for evolution, you can safely take it out of the picture as just another aspect of phenotype contributing to the rates of propagation of the genes. What about economy? Is it able to ignore intelligence like evolution does? Can you invent a dinosaur in a billion years with it, or is it faster? Why? Does it invent a dinosaur or a pencil? If the theory of economics doesn't give you a technical answer to it, not a description that fits the human society, but a separate, self-contained algorithm that has the required property, who is to say that theory found the target? You know that the password to the safe is more than zero but less than a million, and you have an experimentally confirmed theory that it's also less than 500 thousand. This theory doesn't allow you to find the key, even if it correctly describes the properties of the key. You can't throw the key away, you merely made a first step and 19 more are to endure. You made impressive progress, you were able to show that 500 thousands keys are incorrect! This is a big discovery, therefore this first bit of information must be really important. Nope. -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/ ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
