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sideways t1_ir39t47 wrote

Are you saying that there is a specific line that separates "limited intelligence" from "universal intelligence" and that "mentally disabled" people (and presumably animals) fall on the limited side?

Where do you see that border? Do you have any evidence to back that up?

Personally, I'd love to believe that I have universal intelligence but I'm skeptical since I doubt that a lower level of intelligence is able to even recognize a level of intelligence sufficiently beyond it.

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MurderByEgoDeath t1_ir3gubk wrote

Also, it's important to note, a lower qualitative level of intelligence can't recognize a greater intelligence. For example, my pet cat doesn't realize I'm smarter than it (in fact I have a feeling it assumes the opposite lol). But there is no higher qualitative level than us. That's really the main point, there is no higher than universal. There could be much greater quantitative intelligences than us, but we would definitely recognize that. It would just be an entity with massive creative ability, but they would still be able to explain everything to us, and even without them explaining it, if we took the time we could understand it ourselves.

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sideways t1_ir3l5kh wrote

That was exactly my point.

If you agree that a lower qualitative level of intelligence can't recognize a greater one, what makes you so confident that our level is "universal"?

Perhaps we can agree that a baby or small child, similar to animals, does not have universal intelligence. At what point do people "graduate" into it?

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MurderByEgoDeath t1_ir56hmf wrote

I mean there is clearly a cut off, and we clearly do "graduate" into it. But it's probably very very young. Definitely a baby already has it. They're constantly learning new things almost immediately, if not immediately, which means the graduation could possibly be in the womb. But this is an unsolved problem. We can be pretty sure that no other animals have it, or else they wouldn't be limited on what they can learn.

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MurderByEgoDeath t1_ir3bw0x wrote

So when I said "mentally disabled" in that context, I meant severely. As in, needs round the clock care. People with functional intellectual disabilities still have universal intelligence, it's just hindered to whatever extent. The evidence is the mechanism of explanation and computation. If someone can understand anything beyond the genetic knowledge they're born with, then there is nothing, in principle, preventing them from understanding anything else, regardless of its complexity. The difference between a very simple explanation, and the most complex explanation, is the length of the string of statements that explain it. As I said before, there are of course some explanations that require some base level of memory to understand. For example, to truly understand it you must be able to hold a certain level of information in your mind at once. I grant that it's possible a person with disabilities lacks that memory requirement, but even in those people, universality is still there. They have the qualitative requirement of universality, but lack the quantitative requirement of memory. I also grant that there could be explanations that would require quantitative increases that we are incapable of in our current state.

But in both cases, we can make quantitative increases with the requisite knowledge. In fact, we already do. We use computers all the time to gain major quantitative increases in processing power (speed) and memory. We even use simple paper and pen to do this. The proof to Fermat's Last Theorem is far far too long to hold in our mind at once, and even the mathematician who crafted it had to write it out as he went along, continuously going back to previous sections to revisit his conceptual building blocks. Yet it would be foolish to say he doesn't understand it just because he can't hold the entire thing in his mind at once. In the far future, we'll be able to add more and more processing power and memory to ourselves, perhaps even more efficient algorithms, but we'll never need to (or be able to) increase our intelligence qualitatively. Universal is infinite in it's capacity to understand, and you can't add to infinity. If you can, in principle, fully understand anything, then there's no way to fully understand anything in a bigger way. Anything means anything.

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sideways t1_ir3n4js wrote

Thanks for your explanation. That makes more sense. Doesn't David Deutsch take a similar position?

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MurderByEgoDeath t1_ir56oy1 wrote

He definitely does. If you're interested in more of this type of view, I highly recommend his book The Beginning of Infinity.

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Professional-Song216 t1_ir3ylau wrote

You took the words right out of my mouth, any conscious Intelligence would see itself as general intelligence because of the barriers it can’t look past. It seems it would be much more likely that there are a multitude of higher levels, each with their own emergent properties.

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