By David Stephen
A major question in evaluating human intelligence is that why are humans more intelligent than animals?
Several animals have almost comparable environmental reactions to humans, across experiences. But humans are in general smarter. Aside from language, humans are advanced in thinking, imagination, creativity and so forth. How so?
It is generally known that problem with a part of the brain may lead to certain problems in the body. It has been proposed that the brain also has language areas, so to speak, or areas responsible for language.
This could then mean that even if humans and certain animals have similarities in brain anatomy, there are a lot of things about the human brain, with respect to intelligence, that are different.
What is responsible for human intelligence? How is this different from general consciousness? How do humans have what animals do not have? Would humans be able to compete with AI?
Nature
It can be assumed that nature was the dominant intelligence, before humans conquered nature. The intelligence of nature is spread across the body, the oceans, the atmosphere, on ground and so forth. Humans explored, found many secrets and surpassed.
Humans then amassed this intelligence in records, or books. Then, digital, as well.
This became a weakness, of human intelligence, where nature was diversified, so to speak.
AI
Records are now training data for AI, which has become super excellent and would continue to be, with the intense expansion in compute and architecture of AI.
AI, like human intelligence, is going to make it obvious that data can be a dessert, not the main course. The components and pathways of intelligence are exceptional enough to make excellent use of incoming data. This makes the difference in what a human makes of the environment, any environment and what an animal makes of it.
Human intelligence uses the same components with human consciousness, such that, while intelligence is at work, consciousness, the overall also continues. This could make intelligence sometimes at a disadvantage.
It could make human intelligence simply just imitate, such that it does not improve processes. It may try to do things differently towards the same results, but intelligence may be ordinary, because of the importance with consciousness.
AI does not have consciousness at the level of humans. AI is based with intelligence. It has access to the sources of all records of human intelligence depths. It may seem to have just the part of language and just the part—so to speak—of intelligence, which is enough for excellence. It does not have functional competition from emotions, feelings, regulations of internal senses. Its intelligence is also information broad.
In human society, information could make the difference. For AI, this is now its base. AI is often downplayed because neuroscience has not established a major theory of human intelligence.
How Does Human Intelligence Work?
Human intelligence can be said to be specific interactional qualities of electrical and chemical signals in some clusters of neurons. This means that the usual kind of interactions for several other conscious functions are different from those of intelligence, including for language. This is what can be theorized to make humans more intelligent that other organisms.
However, since the basis of the components are similar, with electrical and chemical signals, cother conscious functions, like pain, or emotions may take some from attention.
LLMs
AI consciousness research is AI evaluation and benchmark measure, which is then AI safety and alignment research, applicable to large language models [LLMs]. LLMs may not need the model of the external world to surpass humans.
The only viable model to know how AI is improving is to explore electrical and chemical signals in sets, in clusters of neurons, conceptually.
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1 Comment
It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow