On 21 Mar 2015, at 10:35 am, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 3/20/2015 12:51 PM, John Clark wrote: >>> > I was consider as being crackpot *because* I defended the idea that >>> > machine could be intelligent, and could develop competence. 40 years ago. >> >> It sounds like you were wiser 40 years ago than you are today because today >> you insist on making a nonexistent distinction between competence and >> intelligence and worse, much worse, make the breathtakingly silly statement >> that the turing test doesn't even work for intelligence. >> >> This goes beyond normal stupidity and the only hypothesis I can come up with >> to explain illogic on this massive scale is that you have developed a >> powerful fear of smart machines that clouds your judgement. If somebody else >> has a rival theory to explain why Bruno has this blatantly self >> contradictory belief I'd love to hear it. > > He doesn't. He just makes a big distinction between competence = "doing > something (narrowly defined) well" and intelligence = "being able to learn > anything". He thinks that if you learn one thing well, it inhibits your > ability or willingness to learn something different. He sees them as in > opposition. I don't really agree with him on the generality of his > distinction. Sometimes it works that way, but sometimes learning one thing > well may help you learn something else well, e.g. learning English may > inhibit your ability or willingness to learn Finnish, but it improves your > ability to learn a lot of other things. So his belief is not > self-contradictory, it's just an exaggerated distinction. > > Brent
Either you make a distinction or you do not. You might all like to fight over the need or non-need for "degrees of distinction" to complicate it unnecessarily but that would be a waste of time. Competence and intelligence are different things and cannot be subsumed or conflated with or by each other. Intelligence is the ground state of being that allows any living thing access to an experience of time and place. There is the potential for competence only in the young baby. Competence arises over time; intelligence is evidence of an experiential self ie from inside the womb to the dying breath. There are almost certainly many many different versions of this. Without intelligence no experience is possible so you can probably simply say: Intelligence = consciousness être intelligent(e) = to be awake, aware, in possession of one's faculties. A ground state, nothing more. This does not disappear when the subject is asleep. Intelligence and consciousness do not go for a holiday when Freddy takes a nap. Competence is something you may or may not bother with. Competence is getting stuff done. And it is true that the better you are at getting stuff done in one direction, the less likely you are to want to look at getting stuff done differently to your method which isn't smart at all necause there may be a better way. So competence - which is the automation of certain thinking and acting routines - ploughs deep furrows that the mind can then easily run down next time because hey we all want an easy life. We need our routines and be competent at getting stuff done without too much thinking because there is a lot to do. Imagine if you had no memory for example, you would not be able to get dressed because each time you had to decide the order of how to put on, say, eleven items of clothing by trial and error you might be daunted by the spectrum of possibilities. How many attempts could you make to find the correct order to put on eleven items of clothing? The answer is a very large number and spells out the reason for routines. So the mind's greatest asset - the downshifting of complicated decision procedures into simple algorithms (data compression) is also it's greatest failing. This is because the already-established routines solidify into dogma and belief and are protected and zealously defended as "tribal secrets" and scripture in the mind. We fail to grasp the need to keep adding to our repertoire of routines for all sorts of things. In fact I see no possible way of conflating intelligence with competence. You can do nothing with regard to your intelligence. Intelligence is something you have been ladled-out at conception. Perhaps Kurzweil will have a chip you can have as an implant to give you an IQ of fifteen million but you can still remain, even on that basis an incompetent, stumbling fool if you don't set up and practise your expanding repertoire of life routines. Kim -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
