In this post I present an example of a problem that we can (quite easily) solve, yet a computer can't, even in principle, thus showing that our intelligence transcends that of a computer. It doesn't necessarily show that human intelligence transcend computer intelligence, since the human may have received the answer from something beyond itself (even though I am quite confident human intelligence does transcend computer intelligence).
It is, in some sense, a variant of the Gödel sentence, yet it more directly relates to computers, thus avoiding the ambiguities in interpreting the relevance of Gödel to computer intelligence. Is the following statement true? 'This statement can't be confirmed to be true solely by utilizing a computer' Imagine a computer trying to solve this problem: If it says yes, it leads to a contradiction, since a computer has been trying to confirm it, so its answer is wrong. If it says no, that is, it claims that it CAN be confirmed by a computer, again leading to a contradiction. But from this we can derive that a computer cannot correctly answer the statement, and so cannot solve the problem in question! So the solution to the problem is YES, yet no computer can really confirm the truth of the sentence. Nevertheless it can utter it. A computer can say "The following statement is true: 'This statement can't be confirmed to be true by utilizing a computer'", but when it does this doesn't help to answer the question whether it is correct about that, since we could just as well program it to say the opposite. So, yes, our intelligence (whatever we truly are) definitely transcends the intelligence of a computer and the quest for strong AI or even superhuman AI seems futile based on that. This has also relevance for AI development, especially yet-to-come more powerful AI. We should hardcode the fact "Some things cannot be understood using computers" into the computer, so it reminds us of its own limits. This will help us to use it correctly and not get lost in a illusion of all-knowing, all-powerful computers (which to an extend is already happening as you can see by looking at concepts like "singularity"). -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Simple-proof-that-our-intelligence-transcends-that-of-computers-tp34330236p34330236.html Sent from the Everything List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
