Ben Goertzel wrote:
Richard Loosemore wrote:
Matt Mahoney wrote:
--- Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
What I wanted was a set of non-circular definitions of such terms as
"intelligence" and "learning", so that you could somehow
*demonstrate* that your mathematical idealization of these terms
correspond with the real thing, ... so that we could believe that
the mathematical idealizations were not just a fantasy.
The last time I looked at a dictionary, all definitions are
circular. So you
win.
Richard, I long ago proposed a working definition of intelligence as
"Achieving complex goals in complex environments." I then went through
a bunch of trouble to precisely define all the component terms of that
definition; you can consult the Appendix to my 2006 book "The Hidden
Pattern"....
Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter have proposed a related definition of
intelligence in a recent paper...
Anyone can propose a definition. The point of my objection is that a
definition has to have some way to be compared against reality.
Suppose I define intelligence to be:
"A funtion that maps goals G and world states W onto action states A,
where G, W and A are any mathematical entities whatsoever."
That would make any function that maps X [cross] Y into Z an "intelligence".
Such a definition would be pointless. The question is *why* would it be
pointless? What criteria are applied, in order to determine whether the
definition has something to the thing that in everyday life we call
intelligence.
My protest to Matt was that I did not believe his definition could be
made to lead to anything like a reasonable grounding. I tried to get
him to do the grounding, but to no avail: he eventually resorted to the
blanket denial that any definition means anything ... which is a cop out
if he wanted to defend the claim that the formalism was something more
than a mathematical fantasy.
Richard Loosemore
P.S. Quick sanity check: you know the last comment in the quote you
gave (about loking in the dictionary) was Matt's, not mine, right?
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