logoalt Hacker News

sedan_baklazhan • yesterday at 4:39 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

A software cannot be intelligent.

This is very easily proven by a mind experiment where you replace all the transistors by billions of humans calculating the same software output.

They will not create a new intelligence by doing so.


Replies

lukifer • yesterday at 4:59 PM

Run the same thought experiment the other direction: at a low level, the human brain is just physics and chemical mechanisms, which in principle could be perfectly imitated by transistors calculating the same output. (Yes, such a thing isn't realistic, but neither is billions of humans doing perfect matrix math by hand.)

I still haven't seen a robust definition of "intelligence" that would allow me to tell the difference. (Bear in mind, this is a definitional struggle even in biology: if we were walk back the evolutionary chain from a human, to a protozoan, it's not clear that you could pick a single point where a non-intelligent creature gave birth to an intelligent one. It's a Paradox of the Heap.)

➕ show 1 reply