I'm not much interested in the content of problems they might find easy, that we find difficult to intractable, unless the content is illustrative of their thinking. Rather the how of it. Allowed would be considerations of how we think, as contrastive. — tim wood
The question here, and it's merely speculative, is what does that extra intelligence look like? What can they do that we cannot? And the parallel question, what would better thinking for humans look like? — tim wood
I was thinking more along the lines of how we might think — tim wood
Is this the best possible? Or maybe just the best we can manage? — tim wood
The question here, and it's merely speculative, is what does that extra intelligence look like? What can they do that we cannot? And the parallel question, what would better thinking for humans look like? — tim wood
Is this the best possible? Or maybe just the best we can manage? Is it the gold standard for the universe? Can we imagine a better way? — tim wood
When I try to consciously think, i.e., think in an organized and structured way about a determinate subject matter, the word that best describes my process is linear thinking. I have on occasion brain-stormed, but that's essentially linear. I also try shotgun thinking, and when my ignorance is near total, I just make guesses and follow the emergent lines where they lead. — tim wood
The question here, and it's merely speculative, is what does that extra intelligence look like? — tim wood
What can they do that we cannot?
And the parallel question, what would better thinking for humans look like?
This is a quote from a Scientific American article. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/
Octopuses and their relatives (cuttlefish and squid) represent an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Since my first encounters with these creatures about a decade ago, I have been intrigued by the powerful sense of engagement that is possible when interacting with them. Our most recent common ancestor is so distant—more than twice as ancient as the first dinosaurs—that they represent an entirely independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can connect with them as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. They are probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.
The intelligence and (possibly) consciousness of octopuses seems to me to provide evidence that the evolution of sentience is not an unlikely event. I've heard it speculated that human intelligence evolved in order to support complex social and linguistic behavior, but it is my understanding octopuses are not social. Maybe if we figure out what we share with these mollusks we'll have a better idea what we might share with extraterrestrial visitors. — T Clark
The Cray-1 in 1975 was put at +9. It is not unlikely that something that can traverse the gulfs of the void would be several points higher than us. It is no exaggeration to say that they very well may look at us the way we look at ants. — Akanthinos
Well I suppose at that point Kantian vs. Utilitarian vs. Virtue ethics will be settled. I guess I'd just pray that Kant was right -- that any hyper-intelligent "rational" being is confined to deontological morality by virtue of practical reason -- though I'm not a Kantian, so I suspect it's more likely we'd be tortured to death, enslaved, or just plain obliterated. — John Doe
At the limit, an entire sentence, paragraph, book, or database of information could be condensed in a single high-dimentional figure: a differentially colored sphere, say (perhaps hue, value, and saturation might encode syntactic or semantic info!). — StreetlightX
Heh, you don't have to go far for examples - no need for intergalactic travel - just look at us. Kantian or not, that's what we've been doing with each other, not to mention other animals. — SophistiCat
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