Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Eric Holloway: A scientific test for true intelligence

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

A scientific test should identify precisely what humans can do that computers cannot, avoiding subjective opinion:

The “broken checkerboard” is not the ultimate scientific test for intelligence that we need. But it is a truly scientific test in the sense that it is capable of falsifying the theory that the mind is reducible to computation.

Eric Holloway, “A scientific test for true intelligence” at Mind Matters News

See also: Current artificial intelligence research is unscientific. The assumption that the human mind can be reduced to a computer program has never really been tested. Because AI research is based on a fundamental assumption that has not been scientifically tested—that the human mind can be reduced to a computer—then the research itself cannot be said to be scientific.

What’s hard for computers is easy for humans. Some of the surprising things computers have a hard time doing and why. We often hear that what’s hard for humans is easy for computers. But it turns out that many kinds of problems are exceedingly hard for computers to solve. This class of problems, known as NP-Complete (NPC), was independently discovered by Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin.

and

Math shows why the mind can’t be reduced to a formula. The Liar’s Paradox shows that even mathematics cannot be reduced to a fixed set of axioms. Gödel’s discovery brought back a sense of wonder to mathematics and to the rest of human knowledge. His incompleteness theorem underlies the fact that human investigation can never exhaust all that can be known. Every discovery builds a path to a new discovery.

Comments

Leave a Reply