Hi Shane,
did become possible, won't the Block argument then
become a serious problem? If you did have infinite computation then
you could
just build an AIXI and be done. There would be no point in building a
different
system that was provably less powerful and yet more complex to construct.
Such a system could find a cure to cancer and rework all known mathematics
and extend it a billion fold in the blink of an eye... but would such
a system
really be "intelligent"? To me that seems like a completely pointless
thing to
worry about in the presence of unlimited computation power. It would
be like
arguing that the plane I went on vacation on wasn't really flying
because inside
it wasn't being driven by a mechanism that was producing bird poop.
For me
the important point is that the plane achieves the function of
flight. This is what
I care about when going on vacation and it's the most useful concept
of "flight"
to me. The same would be true of intelligence; if it can work out how
to cure
somebody of cancer and billions of other totally amazing things, in
the end that
is what I care about. I call it intelligence. If you don't want to,
then what I want
to achieve is not what you call intelligence.
I would phrase things a little differently, personally.
I definitely agree with you that "intelligence" should be conceived as
having to do with
functionality, not internal structures/dynamics.
However, I don't think that intelligence is the only important goal; it
is not the only
thing I want to achieve in creating artificial minds.
There is something, to me, profoundly unaesthetic about systems like
AIXI. If I had infinite
computing power, I'd rather build an AIXI **plus** some other systems
with more
aesthetic baggage like self, will, awareness, feeling, etc. The
computing power of this
combined set of systems would not exceed that of AIXI, but the aesthetic
quality
would, according to my own aesthetics ;-)
-- Ben
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