alt Hacker News> If you saw creatures behaving like this in the wild, you might attribute some rudimentary intelligence to them.
> But we’ve just shown you how this apparent intelligence arises from the bottom up, with just four neurons and two connections. There’s no magic here. In this view, behavior emerges from neural circuits.
Isn't the conclusion here that very simple behaviors like the sparks are intelligent? I would say even a single neuron has some tiny amount of intelligence, and what the author means by "no magic" and "emergent behavior" is just a different perspective that minimizes it.
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If you stop labeling things neuron and just call them imperative code, or a PID controller are, you still making the same argument for intelligence?
A line follower with 5 photodiodes and a simple loop steering towards bright or dark lines (pid or not) works, just like the example of following light with two neurons.
When I did hobby robotics competition, some would train neural nets for this, many just had crude for loops, and most often it was PID.
Imo most people have to do this to protect themselves from the actual (correct) implications of it, which would be that we're constantly abusing and murdering intelligent beings (and not just animals).
It seems like no one stops to ask, "isn't it kind of bad that we're developing this system of machine intelligence to be our code-writing slaves, without ever really interrogating the ethics? Maybe we don't actually understand how our own brains function well enough to assert it's not similar (especially as language goes) to these kind of weighted association graphs?"
Or even the "well we made it, so it's ours" responses, which we sort of answered a long time ago when we decided kids aren't property, but I digress...
Intelligence is an arbitrary term humans assign to stuff subjectively.
Take out the "human" and it's all just algos on a scale of complexity.