Fame has this mystical quality of turning shit into gold. I think this is what the alchemists were looking for all the time.
Often the difference between something being profound or crazy is the person saying it.
The difference between great and mediocre contemporary art is the artist who made it. — ovdtogt
"Prediction" seems a wrong concept to apply to language. I thought that was an astrologer's domain. Language is about information isn't it and while that maybe useful to make predictions, language itself is solely about transmitting information and so your version of "mirroring" seems a bit off the mark. Perhaps you'll enlighten me. — TheMadFool
Yes and makes us wonder if we're mistaking one for the other in every possible way which I think can happen in only 2 ways and what a coincidence that number 2 means shit. — TheMadFool
I agree with you that we lack a good definition for general intelligence. But as my example of a thing that is clearly as intelligent as us but can't predict all our associations demonstrates, even our intuition doesn't agree with the Turing test as what is intelligent. We need to keep working to understand what intelligence is and as I currently see it, the way the Turing test is used in this work and in things like AI development, it diverts us into a path that is harmful. It is quite obvious that a transistor based general intelligence doesn't need to be able to speak any language in an indistinguishable way from humans and that that would be an inefficient and unnecessarily complex way to program general intelligence - yet people tend to see that as an important goal right now. Harmful, I say! — Qmeri
Indeed, an important criterion of intelligence is the ability to generate unexpected stimulus-responses. — sime
It shows that the need for Gods persists in modern society. — ovdtogt
For a good reason or bad? — TheMadFool
Do we take aspirin for a good reason or bad? Both I think. Good that we have it, bad that we need it. — ovdtogt
Why couldn't you have fluent conversation? I mean, as humans, we can appreciate how valuable a bone-toy is to a dog, how a nest is essential to the life of a bird. Surely, if we could converse, we could comment about those things even though they aren't associations held in common with us. We can see and understand associations that are unrelated to us. Why couldn't a hypothetical intelligent extraterrestrial capable of learning about us do the same, and why couldn't we do the same with them?↪aporiap I'm actually talking about fluent conversation here - like what would pass a Turing test. But I do agree, that while it would always be slow and awkward, we could use the pre-existing words and phrases to communicate about things common for us. A lot of time would be used to deal with all the extra wrong associations and unmeant ways of approaching the common subjects, but some of our associations would be common and useful. In anything complex it would be much more useful to use something without mirroring. — Qmeri
You're kinda hitting on the reason we have communications problems with other humans: different mental associations. I'd say that no two people have the exact same associations, not when even moderately complex concepts are involved. The more unlike the people are, the less effective the communication. I agree that with aliens, the differences would be stark. On the other hand, it seems that some communications would be possible - I'd expect there'd still be recognizable referrents to objects and actions, and the relations between them. Discussion of art or politics would probably be hopeless.The main reason we have not been able to replicate human conversation with computers is because we use mirroring in human speech. This means that we trust that our phrases cause almost the same associations in the minds of the participants of the conversation — Qmeri
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