alt Hacker NewsIn your reading, what is the distinction between blindsight’s scrambler and real intelligence? My reading is that it’s just as real, and draws out the disadvantages a sense of self constrains intelligence with
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pmontra • today at 6:19 PM
I think that Blindsight's scramblers were intelligent but not conscious, which for us is very difficult to understand. For them consciousness was a blight.
For the HN readers that are missing the context: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm Full text on the web site of the author.
Sure. I should have been more precise about what is 'real intelligence' here.
What I mean is that blindsight's scramblers are aliens that cannot share human values. Their structure is completely different to ours, their qualia (or whether they even have it) is impossible for us to understand. In short, they do not have a soul. When Claude does this "slowly revealing a dramatic insight" thing that it does, it does that not because it has judged itself through some introspection as having an insight to share. It does not even know what an insight is or is not. It is not sharing anything, because it is not capable of sharing, because it does not have a soul.
The aesthetic structure of its replies is a pattern, a constraint on the token distribution, like the color of noise.
It's my bad to use the word 'intelligence' because it's so overloaded. Will Claude will act as a therapist or produce value or produce a work of art? No. It cannot, because it does not have a soul. I leave it freely open to interpretation whether having a soul is required for "real intelligence." But what I've noticed is that "intelligence" in these discussions is mostly used to denote some capability to produce [economic/social] value. In my mind value is a relational thing, a thing of human feeling.