Comment by nathan_compton
1 year ago
"Since there is no objective definition of AGI or test for it, there’s no basis for any meaningful speculation on what can or cannot achieve it; discussions about it are quasi-religious, not scientific."
This is such a weird thing to say. Essentially _all_ scientific ideas are, at least to begin with, poorly defined. In fact, I'd argue that almost all scientific ideas remain poorly defined with the possible exception of _some_ of the basic concepts in physics. Scientific progress cannot be and is not predicated upon perfect definitions. For some reason when the topic of consciousness or AGI comes up around here, everyone commits a sort of "all or nothing" logical fallacy: absence of perfect knowledge is cast as total ignorance.
Yes. That absence of perfect definition was part of why Turing came with his famous test so long ago. His original paper is a great read!
What is the rough definition, then?
Sam Harris argues similarly in The Moral Landscape. There's this conception objective morality cannot exist outside of religion, because as soon as you're trying to prove one, philosophers rush with pedantic criticism that would render any domain of science invalid.
I kinda get where Sam Harris is coming from, but its kind of silly to call what he is talking about morality. As far as I can tell, Harris is just a moral skeptic who believes something like "we should get a bunch of people together to decide kind of what we want in the world and then rationally pursue those ends." But that is very different from morality as it was traditionally understood (eg, facts about behaviors which are objective in their assignment of good and bad).