Charles: Flaws in Hamlet: I don't think of this as involving general
intelligence. Specialized intelligence, yes, but if you see general
intelligence at work there you'll need to be more explicit for me to
understand what you mean. Now determining whether a particular deviation
from iambic pentameter was a flaw would require a deep human intelligence,
but I don't feel that understanding of how human emotions are structured
is a part of general intelligence except on a very strongly superhuman
level. The level where the AI's theory of your mind was on a par with, or
better than, your own.
Charles,
My flabber is so ghasted, I don't quite know what to say. Sorry, I've never
come across any remarks quite so divorced from psychological reality. There
are millions of essays out there on Hamlet, each one of them different. Why
don't you look at a few?:
http://www.123helpme.com/search.asp?text=hamlet
There are also probably many thousands of critical essays and books on
Hamlet, (and may well have been a million written since SHakespeare's
time)..
The reason people are able to write so many essays is that when you have to
write on say whether Hamlet is a tragically flawed hero, you can choose to
approach this play (and indeed virtually every other play) from many
different angles and domains - tragic theory, psychological - Oedipal
complex/ youthful identity crisis, political - young man caught up in
corrupt state, moral, Elizabethan dilemma of horror of regicide vs loathing
of tyranny, conflict between Hamlet the intellectual and the man of action,
inferiority complex in relation to Fortinbras, sexist deconstruction of the
suppression of Ophelia, use of poetic imagery and metaphor, stifling
self-awareness, and on and on and on....
The reason over 70 per cent of students procrastinate when writing essays
like this about Hamlet, (and the other 20 odd per cent also procrastinate
but don't tell the surveys), is in part that it is difficult to know which
of the many available approaches to take, and which of the odd thousand
lines of text to use as support, and which of innumerable critics to read.
And people don't have a neat structure for essay-writing to follow. (And
people are inevitably and correctly afraid that it will all take if not
forever then far, far too long).
This is also the reason why a major percentage of students have difficulty
writing an ordered essay and presenting a coherent argument - their essays
tend to be cluttered with too many different themes, and keep going off at
tangents.
In short, essay writing is an excellent example of an AGI in action - a mind
freely crossing different domains to approach a given subject from many
fundamentally different angles. (If any subject tends towards narrow AI,
it is normal as opposed to creative maths).
Essay writing also epitomises the NORMAL operation of the human mind. When
was the last time you tried to - or succeeded in concentrating for any
length of time?
As William James wrote of the normal stream of consciousness:
"Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a
beaten track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and
transitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions and
discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements, the subtlest
associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a
seething caldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in
a state of bewildering activity, where partnerships can be joined or
loosened in an instant, treadmill routine is unknown, and the unexpected
seems the only law."
Ditto:
The normal condition of the mind is one of informational disorder: random
thoughts chase one another instead of lining up in logical causal sequences.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Ditto the Dhammapada, "Hard to control, unstable is the mind, ever in
quest of delight,"
When you have a mechanical mind that can a) write essays or tell stories or
hold conversations [which all present the same basic difficulties] and b)
has a fraction of the difficulty concentrating that the brain does and
therefore c) a fraction of the flexibility in crossing domains, then you
might have something that actually is an AGI.
-------------------------------------------
agi
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