Comment by pixl97
3 years ago
>Everybody knows what intelligence is
Much like...
"Everyone knows what porn is"
"Everyone knows who god is"
"Everyone knows what beauty is"
The devil is in the details and rather generic words that describe a gradient can never capture the exact nature of what we're trying to define in specific situations.
> The devil is in the details
Only if you care about those details. Almost no one does.
In almost any conversation, everyone does in fact know what intelligence, porn, god and beauty are. Yes, all those ideas are fuzzy at the borders, but we almost never need to resolve them in detail when talking about them. When we do, then yes, things get tricky and there's a lot of disagreement - but at the end of the day, as the phrase I once read on the Internet goes, it all has to add up to normality. You can still work with fuzzy, casual concepts, even though you can't define them precisely.
You can never capture the exact nature of anything outside of logic and math. That's too high of a bar. Philosophers who have worked on this problem like Wittgenstein talk about concepts in terms of family resemblances, not exact definitions. If I'm trying to understand whether a system is intelligent, I don't need a logical proof. I learn whether it is intelligent by testing whether it can successfully do many of the same things that other intelligent systems do.
But words are meant to convey meaning to other people, so what the word means to others is more important than what it means to you.
This sort of problem is common with language, and is a great example of why I'm not really on board with using natural language for technical things.
>But words are meant to convey meaning to other people, so what the word means to others is more important than what it means to you.
I pretty much agree with that, so I'm not sure where the disagreement is here. Let me go back to the original statement I was responding to.
>Since nobody actually knows what "intelligence" is, the word will mean to people whatever they want it to mean.
If I tell you someone is intelligent, you roughly know what I am talking about. Just because it's hard to formalize that doesn't mean that that the word can mean whatever people want it to mean. For example, if I tell you my friend is intelligent, you would be wrong to interpret that as meaning that my friend has red hair, because hair color is irrelevant to the traits that we normally associate with intelligence. The fact that there are right and wrong ways of interpreting my sentence implies that there is some generally agreed upon notion of what intelligence is, even if that notion is fuzzy and has grey areas.
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