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Learning and Intelligence

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Additional thoughts on learning and intelligence In previous posts I've looked at the idea that learning is the process of connecting responses to stimulus , and that the actual way that learning happens in animals is essentially a form of data compression.  If we think of learning like this, then we should ask how the data compression works, what process or rules does it follow if any? The key to good data compression is to find patterns in the data and take advantage of that, and the world we live in comes ready made with rules that govern how it works, the physical laws of the universe. It would seem that it would be possible for our brains to take advantage of this to compress responses to stimuli efficiently, and that that process could have the beneficial side effect of making the prediction of physical processes easier. The learning process would not only be encoding individual responses, but also patterns in those responses and the rules that determine what shape those...
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Smart

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Term : Smart Typical definition example:  having or showing a quick-witted intelligence Proposed Definition:   Accurately predicting or recognizing the limitations in a problem The typical definition of 'smart' is basically just "intelligent", or sometimes just "intelligent, but quickly". However the way the word is used it doesn't seem like most people mean intelligent, for example it's possible to say someone is intelligent but isn't being very smart. I think there is something to the idea that it involves quick responses though. Being able to predict or recognize limitations has a lot of impacts that would lead to the kind of behavior we call being smart. Even someone who isn't thought of as intelligent could be viewed as being smart in domains where they have experience or an instinct for certain kinds of problems. If you can recognize limitations and constraints then you're not going to waste your time with trying to fig...
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Definition of "definitions"

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Term : Definitions Typical definition example:   a statement of the exact meaning of a word, especially in a dictionary. Wikipedia example:  a definition is a statement of the meaning of a term Proposed Definition:   A voluntary limitation on the usage of a term Intro:   I've been thinking about the definition of "definition" is for a long time. It's hard because there's two things that seem to be true about definitions: People can learn the meaning of words from their definition, and therefore avoid misusing it Definitions can never capture exactly the way a population uses a term Which seems like a contradiction. On one hand a definition can never be entirely correct because it'll never capture the true way a word is used, on the other hand a definition can be used to rule out some usages as being incorrect.  Justification:     I believe the way to fix this contradiction is to recognize that a definition can't be forced on ...
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Masculine

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Typical Definition of Masculinity : possession of the qualities traditionally associated with men. Wikipedia Definition :  attributes, behaviors and roles generally associated with boys and men. Proposed Definition: Behavior caused by a combination of pessimism and self confidence The first issue I have with the typical definition is that I don't believe people actually use it in such a broad way. It would be much more accurate to say "qualities traditionally associate with men and not women ." It's technically true that "eating" and "breathing" are usually associated with men, just because they're associated with everyone and men are a subset of that group. This highlights a common problem I have with the ways many definitions are historically constructed - they really only make sense if you already understand the meaning of the term. The second problem is that often definitions will exempt biological differences between sexes as bein...
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Intelligence

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Typical Definition of Intelligence : the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. Wikipedia Definition: the ability to perceive information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context. Proposed Definition: A measure of the ability to make comparisons To define intelligence what typically happens is that we start with intelligent behavior, which essentially just means acting like a human. Animals that act more like us are more intelligent, and things that act less like us are less intelligent. People who can solve the kinds of problems humans can solve, but can solve them faster or can solve more difficult versions are deemed to be more intelligent. Then, working backwards, we assume there's some quality of 'intelligence' that causes or enables this kind of behavior. One of the biggest problems with this very vague definition of intelligence is that it's hard to nail down. Is someo...
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Post Scarcity

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The definitions of Post Scarcity, like this one from wikipedia, are pretty good already: Post - scarcity  is a hypothetical economy in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely. However I think that we can focus it a little more by looking at the details and by doing so get a better idea of the underlying factors at play. The first issue is the question of what kind of scarcity it's talking about. I think most people assume it's of "stuff" - things that people want. But in a very general sense we're surrounded by "stuff" already, far more than we could ever need or want. The raw materials that make up everything we use are abundant, as is the energy to convert them into any useful form. What's missing then is people to make the things we want from the stuff we have, what's scarce now is human labor. The definition alludes to the fact th...
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Experiential definitions of some emotions

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Definitions of emotions are usually so difficult that it seems often we don't even try, or just assume that it's subjective or just impossible to define. Still I've made some attempts here. I don't necessarily think these definitions are accurate, but they seem like a good first step towards an accurate understanding of these ideas. Emotions are a part of being conscious, but it's not immediately clear how they relate to the rest of our conscious experience. However, I think if we look at the fundamentals of what kind of information is available within conscious experience we can build up a definition of emotions from first principles. So, what are the kinds of information available to us when we're conscious, I think we can really narrow it down to just three things: Sensory information - the world interacts with our senses and those sensory organs transmit information about the world to our consciousness. This information can be experienced immediately, ...
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Animal learning as data compression

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Instead of the more general kind of learning , let's look at what kind of qualities animal learning has, what mechanisms actually make brains work. I think that there's undoubtedly at least part of our brains (and other animal brains) that work this way. They connect stimulus to response and are able to be adapted over time, which would qualify as a form or learning. If we accept that learning is an unconscious way of storing stimulus and response pairs, then we can think of the different ways that could be accomplished. We can imagine a very simple animal that just has one set of sensory receptors and each individual receptor is simply hardwired to stimulate a particular response - when triggered it flees light for example. And we can imagine more and more of these simple 1-to-1 sensory-to-response connections being made, each working independently of each other. Eventually though for animals with a lot of detailed senses and a lot of possible responses, they would end up wi...
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Learning

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Learning Typical definition of Learning : the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or by being taught. Wikipedia Definition of Learning:  the act of acquiring new, or modifying and reinforcing existing, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences Proposed Definition:   Learning is a probabilistic search of solutions to a problem, with qualitative feedback The typical definitions are difficult when we want to separate learning out from other similar or more general activities. For example, if I buy a book, in some sense I've acquired knowledge. Or a more interesting example might be copying a digital book to a hard drive, did the computer "learn" anything? Another problematic example is when an animal is born with instincts. Those instincts were acquired at some point during it's life. Or if it doesn't display those instincts immediately, but has instinctual behavior triggered at some point, when was the knowledge of w...
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Physical

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Term : Physical Typical definition example : O f or relating to things perceived through the senses as opposed to the mind; tangible or concrete. Wikipedia example :  A physical property is any property that is measurable, whose value describes a state of a physical system. Proposed Definition:  The set of things whereby any item in the set can cause an effect on any other item in the set Justification : The typical definition of physical just splits up all things that we'd consider physical (atoms, particles, energy, etc.) into physical things that happen in the brain and other physical things, or it explicitly assumes the mind isn't physical or doesn't have physical causes or explanations. The new proposed definition leaves the distinction of whether the mind is physical or not to be tested and discovered though the scientific method. The mind may end up being physical, it may end up not being physical, but that will depend on scientific investigation, instead ...
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