this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Yes, but you could argue that human brain is a large pattern matcher with a dictionary. What separates human intelligence from machine intelligence?
The question is not if something is a patter matcher or not. The question is how this matching is done. There are ways we consider intelligent and ways that are not. Human brain is generally considered intelligent, some algorithms using heuristics or machine learning would be considered artificial intelligence, a hash map matching string A to string B is not in any way intelligent. But all this methods can produce the same results so it's impossible to determine if something is intelligent or not without looking inside the black box.
Any hash map you or I have ever seen is not very intelligent, possibly not at all. But the infinitely large hash map we’re talking of is different. It can handle any possible situation it encounters. That’s part of its definition.
Our hashmaps — the finite hashmaps we use to store shipping addresses and candy crush preferences — would be torn to shreds in the real world. But not this infinite hashmap that maps all possible inputs to all possible outputs. It’s a one-layer network but it’s really wide. It’s as wide as the universe of possibility, at least.
No, infinite hash map is still not intelligent, not even by the standards used in computer science. It's not a one-layer network, it's not a network at all. To talk about network nodes form layer 1 would have to connect to multiple nodes in layer 2. The signal would have to be processed somehow. Extremely big one layer neural network could be intelligent for all we know. In theory some consciousness could emerge from sufficiently complex system like that. In a hash map there's no processing though, not matter how big it is. You simply take element A and return element B mapped to it. The operation is always the same. Making this map bigger does not add complexity, knowledge or alter how it's processing inputs. Big hash map is just like a small hash map, only bigger.
Yes, but we have no strict or clear s ientific definition of what makes humans intelligent or what intelligence even is.
Humans are intelligent and machines are not "just because"
Yes, we don't have a universal definition of intelligence but we in general everyone would agree that knowledge is not intelligence. Simply storing information does not make anything intelligent. Book is not intelligent, Wikipedia is not intelligent, hash map is not intelligent.
Yes, but we also have to draw a line somewhere. You could just as well turn any non-random based computer program into a huge hashtable, yet the intelligence arises from somewhere. There is no magic to human intelligence, unless you start believing in the soul or something.
Yes, that's the whole point. You can turn substitute computer program by a hash map and the results would be the same but everyone in general agree that a hash map is not intelligent. Defining exactly why it's not intelligent is tricky though. It comes down to some very basic concepts that we understand intuitively but are very hard precisely define like what it means to 'know' something or to 'understand' something. One famous example is a very good dictionary: let's say some guy has a very good Chinese dictionary. A Chinese speaking person can write question down and give it to this guy. He will look up every symbol in the question, translate it to English, respond and translate the response back to Chinese using the same dictionary. Does he 'speak' Chinese? He can communicate in Chinese but obviously he does not speak it. Does he 'understand' Chinese? Again, not really, he can just look up symbols in a dictionary. Specifying the exact reason why we would not say that he can 'speak' Chinese is difficult thought. It's the same with intelligence. We intuitively understand why a book is not intelligent but to say exactly why is tricky.
Yes but you are missing my point. We have no way of measuring if a human is intelligent. The whole intelligence might just as well be an illusion.