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Post by Orac on Jan 10, 2024 0:10:08 GMT
You haven't shown much in the way of substantial holes that require any explanation. The test questions tend to concentrate on human primitives - like shapes, 'colours', rotations and replacement and the tests have a clever internal self-check mechanism that splits the questions into type and makes the first question in the type set so easy that anyone who understood the quality of the question (what is being asked) would get the correct answer. Incorrect answers that follow this 'tutorial question' would show inability to deal with difficulty rather than not understanding the question. One might ask the same about the psychopathy checklist. The checklist works because people who score high tend to turn out to be psychopaths. With IQ tests and intelligence things are a bit firmer, in that people who score high tend to display the advantages one might expect from intelligence. Test familiarity is a known issue but doesn't seem to make that much odds (a few points). The types of question are still only a small subset of all of skills the brain performs. They are abstract and logical plus somewhat detached from normal human work. Well intelligence itself has to be abstracted from other psychological phenomena in order to talk about it or evaluate it. The picture we have of it is abstracted as a distilled function - ie from the observation that people who are good at working out one thing, tend to be better at working out a lot (or most things). The closest i can come to succinct definition is that intelligence is the ability to come to a correct conclusion when everything needed to come to a conclusion is at hand and unambiguous. |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Jan 10, 2024 0:12:47 GMT
Actually with memory the memory works not by storing each piece of information, but by being able to reconstruct the information. For example, if you were asked to recall the door on your grandmother's house you would know general qualities of the door such as all doors open on hinges and all doors have some kind of knob and usually a letterbox. You would further reconstruct the memory by thinking of the age of the house, as in say a Victorian house often has a particular style. So memory is like a hierarchy of generalisations, and another thing is the memory is part of the same stuff that does the thinking, so it is the very opposite of a computer where it has a separate memory bank. You could say an intelligent person is one that has a well-ordered system of generalised concepts.
I suppose it is a bit like the way maths works, and in listening to someone the other day who is a mathematician, he was saying he wish he had learn category theory long ago. You see he started learning physics, realised all physics was maths, so went to being a mathematician to deal with physics, and now he says vast amounts of mathematical theorems can be derived by category theory, as in the top level of the stack, higher than logic itself which is a subset of category theory. So in principle all you need to remember is one theory and you could explain all of science! The problem is that to do this is rather tricky. It's also interesting to note that even for a hyper intelligent AI system, the code to create it is very small compared to traditional computer programmes, like only a few hundred lines perhaps.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Jan 10, 2024 0:42:27 GMT
The types of question are still only a small subset of all of skills the brain performs. They are abstract and logical plus somewhat detached from normal human work. Well intelligence itself has to be abstracted from other psychological phenomena in order to talk about it or evaluate it. The picture we have of it is abstracted as a distilled function - ie from the observation that people who are good at working out one thing, tend to be better at working out a lot (or most things). The closest i can come to succinct definition is that intelligence is the ability to come to a correct conclusion when everything needed to come to a conclusion is at hand and unambiguous.You get the variation where you have a spectrum from fast and superficial thinkers to slow deep thinkers. Which type is more valuable in solving problems depends on the problem you are dealing with. Like working on a satellite requires extreme diligence and not so bothered about the speed, where other things you get paid in proportion to the speed you do something.
Another interesting study which was done showed the system of the brain being on a kind of phase change boundary. Only when it operates in this region can it function properly. Too much one way and it would go to sleep and to much the other way and it would go mad, so from that it is reasonable to suppose intelligence has something to do with the ability to balance the mind. Someone who gets angry is known to suffer a reduction in intelligence. The way the research explained it was a system on a phase change boundary is very sensitive to small fluctuations, as in a small impulse would create a longer chain of neuron firings. You can see the same general behaviour in an Ising model undergoing a phase change. None of this stuff was understood in the 19th century though.
I'm of the view that the 19th century view is only popular today because it sounds right in being intuitive and is easy to comprehend. A bit like the Daily Mail is popular because it is nice and easy to understand as it saves its readers from any more subtle argument or doubt.
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Post by Orac on Jan 10, 2024 0:58:51 GMT
Well intelligence itself has to be abstracted from other psychological phenomena in order to talk about it or evaluate it. The picture we have of it is abstracted as a distilled function - ie from the observation that people who are good at working out one thing, tend to be better at working out a lot (or most things). The closest i can come to succinct definition is that intelligence is the ability to come to a correct conclusion when everything needed to come to a conclusion is at hand and unambiguous.You get the variation where you have a spectrum from fast and superficial thinkers to slow deep thinkers. Which type is more valuable in solving problems depends on the problem you are dealing with. Like working on a satellite requires extreme diligence and not so bothered about the speed, where other things you get paid in proportion to the speed you do something.
Another interesting study which was done showed the system of the brain being on a kind of phase change boundary. Only when it operates in this region can it function properly. Too much one way and it would go to sleep and to much the other way and it would go mad, so from that it is reasonable to suppose intelligence has something to do with the ability to balance the mind. Someone who gets angry is known to suffer a reduction in intelligence. The way the research explained it was a system on a phase change boundary is very sensitive to small fluctuations, as in a small impulse would create a longer chain of neuron firings. You can see the same general behaviour in an Ising model undergoing a phase change. None of this stuff was understood in the 19th century though.
I'm of the view that the 19th century view is only popular today because it sounds right in being intuitive and is easy to comprehend. A bit like the Daily Mail is popular because it is nice and easy to understand as it saves its readers from any more subtle argument or doubt.
Our model of intelligence is behavioral / functional. It would apply even if there were no such thing as neurons. Like i said that it comes from the simple observation that people who are good at working out one thing, tend to be better at working out a lot (or most things). However, we don't have a proper model of how it works at a mechanical level. People who ruminate over a problem relentlessly have a dedication advantage. However, i'm not so sure this isn't tested for in the normal test - is a person who comes to the correct conclusion faster not (by normal understanding) more intelligent? |
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Jan 10, 2024 1:21:09 GMT
You get the variation where you have a spectrum from fast and superficial thinkers to slow deep thinkers. Which type is more valuable in solving problems depends on the problem you are dealing with. Like working on a satellite requires extreme diligence and not so bothered about the speed, where other things you get paid in proportion to the speed you do something.
Another interesting study which was done showed the system of the brain being on a kind of phase change boundary. Only when it operates in this region can it function properly. Too much one way and it would go to sleep and to much the other way and it would go mad, so from that it is reasonable to suppose intelligence has something to do with the ability to balance the mind. Someone who gets angry is known to suffer a reduction in intelligence. The way the research explained it was a system on a phase change boundary is very sensitive to small fluctuations, as in a small impulse would create a longer chain of neuron firings. You can see the same general behaviour in an Ising model undergoing a phase change. None of this stuff was understood in the 19th century though.
I'm of the view that the 19th century view is only popular today because it sounds right in being intuitive and is easy to comprehend. A bit like the Daily Mail is popular because it is nice and easy to understand as it saves its readers from any more subtle argument or doubt.
Our model of intelligence is behavioral / functional. It would apply even if there were no such thing as neurons. Like i said that it comes from the simple observation that people who are good at working out one thing, tend to be better at working out a lot (or most things). However, we don't have a proper model of how it works at a mechanical level. People who ruminate over a problem relentlessly have a dedication advantage. However, i'm not so sure this isn't tested for in the normal test - is a person who comes to the correct conclusion faster not (by normal understanding) more intelligent? Yes well I get what you are saying and you come close to the psychologist I was listening to who I mentioned in the beginning of the thread which said easy peasy. The trouble is it makes this assumption which contradicts empirical research. There is a degree of specialisation between male and female brains if we look at it on a statistical basis for a start. A major difference is the amount of long-range vs short-range neuronal connections. It seems to me nature recognised what Adam Smith pointed out regarding division of labour. It's one hell of a contentious political point these days and the ideology of the ideologues blinds them to the truth.
Also the thing is that the leading research into this today is comprehending the actual mechanics of the brain. We just did not have the technology 100 years ago. One of the most advanced studies I came across was actually from the Chinese. Goodness knows what they intend to do with it, but understanding on that level is a powerful science, for both good and evil. It's like understanding the physiology of the body by the biochemistry of the molecules to the level where you can say this atomic bond breaking in this molecule causes this kind of cancer. |
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