Can intelligence be separated from the body?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/science/artificial-intelligence-body-robots.html

by lxm • 3 years ago

53 78 3 years ago

nytimes.com

electric_mayhem• 3 years ago

A Neal Stephenson book named “Fall; or Dodge in Hell” explores this idea a bit.

It’s a worthwhile read.

aschearer• 3 years ago

To what extent is our intelligence a consequence of our bodies, evolution? Would a computer have intuition? Fight or flight responses? As a species, we're still debating which mammals are "intelligent" and they share most of our circuitry and evolutionary history. Will we be able to recognize "intelligence" in another form? Or flipping it around, will it recognize our intelligence? Or will it see us much like we see a chimpanzee colony?

yreg3• 3 years ago

Why shouldn't it be possible to simulate a full human mind, say, at atomic level? What does the intelligence/consciousness need that's impossible to simulate in software? I can't think of many reasons, besides perhaps true randomness?

notahacker4• 3 years ago

Why shouldn't it be possible to simulate a full human mind, say, at atomic level?

Who's designing and running the simulation, on what infrastructure?

mxkopy• 3 years ago

I think you would end up simulating a childhood, society, cultural history, etc, - basically a human world - if you want to develop a human intelligence. I feel like this is an even harder problem than simulating a brain by itself.

burnished5• 3 years ago

To what extent is our intelligence a consequence of our bodies, evolution?

Entirely? We're meat machines.

Would a computer have intuition? Fight or flight responses?

If your grandmother had wheels would she be a bicycle?

majkinetor3• 3 years ago

Yeah, if it walks like a duck ...

deesep• 3 years ago

Cars have wheels. They aren't bicycles. If all grandma does is function like a bicycle, then she is essentially a bicycle made of meat.

dingusdew• 3 years ago

AI has a body, it's just not the type of body we think of when we think of "body."

AI can have many sensors that allow it to "see/hear/feel" outside of itself.

AI is generally limited to its own system and requires a great deal of processing power, so it cannot easily "jump to a new body" as many people worry that a rogue AI will "find its way on to the internet." Fairly sure it would be useless for it to try to shack up on small low-power slow-CPU devices.

AI has a body, and physical limitations, because computers are not fucking ethereal. They have physical locations, even when they are "virtual machines," they still live on physical hardware.

When you take a drill to a hard drive, you are physically destroying data. Data is real.

ttpphd• 3 years ago

Is the AI in the room with us now?

IIAOPSW• 3 years ago

The AI is always looking down on us from the cloud.

burnished5• 3 years ago

Huh, you've got an interesting observation there - I hadn't considered notional agents to be embodied because the specific location the code runs just isnt that important, but if we were to posit self aware artificial agents they might have a unifying perspective rooted in the practicalities of computer and network hardware. "If you flip my bits such that error correction cannot detect, does my data not corrupt?" sort of thing.

majkinetor3• 3 years ago

But the AI can transmit from good enough computer A to good enough computer B.

We will make it that way eventually. But we will make us that way eventually too, via full body transplant or something like Altered Carbon.

So no big difference indeed. Its just technology level for different entities. People are scared of AI, I would be basically equally scared if some psycopath can achive such transendence.

paulsutter• 3 years ago

Ask Stephen Hawking

jamesgreenleaf• 3 years ago

When we have the technology to extend or replace our own neurons with artificial ones, then we can start to answer these questions.

Rebuild your ship and find out if you're still Theseus.

petilon• 3 years ago

You mean like this: https://neuralink.com/approach/ ?

kiba• 3 years ago

It doesn't replace any neurons, merely interface with it.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

Boyuan Chen, a roboticist at Duke University who is working on developing intelligent robots, pointed out that the human mind — or any other animal mind, for that matter — is inextricable from the body’s actions in and reactions to the real world, shaped over millions of years of evolution.

I'm a little surprised to learn that some people believe intelligence can be separated from the body. Intelligence didn't develop in a vacuum, then get poured into the body — it developed both evolutionary and in the case of you personally as a result of being a body in the world. It isn't something you can separate from our senses, or the physical world we inhabit. Anything else feels like mind-body dualism to me. That, or a science fiction model of the brain as being functionally like a squishy computer chip, just waiting to have programs uploaded into it.

colordrops• 3 years ago

Maybe not intelligence with conceptual capabilities but what about direct experiencing or witnessing? For every one of us, animal or human, we start primarily as an experiencer of reality, then as we grow we build a model of the physical world and how we relate to it. But that "subjective" experience is primary, and our model of reality, materialist or otherwise, is conceptual and inferred and secondary, including the idea that our firsthand experience and bodies are one in the same.

RA_Fisher2• 3 years ago

Things like AutoGPT and BabyAGI seem intelligent to me.

Intelligence is defined as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.

How could it be denied that things like AutoGPT can acquire knowledge and apply skills?

jutrewag2• 3 years ago

Not sure why you’re talking about side projects like AutoGPT when you could be referencing chatGPT/GPT4 with the same arguments you’re making.

ravi-delia9• 3 years ago

The problem is that it's absolutely something you can sever from specific senses or specific parts of your body. If I were to go blind, I suspect I would be the same person afterward (or at least no more different than I would be had I retained my sight). If I lost an arm, I'd still be me, just a me controlling one less arm.

I guess my point is that if intelligence is really inseparable from the body, you'd expect that it would be impossible to keep a head alive without a body- not for any biological reasons, but because the patient would become abruptly...well I'd like to say braindead but apparently there's some other source of intelligence. And you can debate about whether a sci-fi "upload" of your brain is still you, but if you're going to say it wouldn't be able to think at all then you're the one proposing mind-body dualism.

edit: Of course the obvious counterargument is that plenty of people get minor to moderate brain damage while plausibly remaining the same person. I don't think I'm willing to bite that bullet, so my best pitch is that "me" is as made up a category as every other, so we should expect some weirdness.

JohnFen• 3 years ago

you'd expect that it would be impossible to keep a head alive without a body

Is the head not part of the body?

Here's an interesting reality -- there is no hard dividing line between where the brain stops and the rest of the body starts. It's a bit like trying to say where the atmosphere stops and space begins. And we have neural masses around the heart and stomach that engage in independent activity. Some neuroscientists argue that it's reasonable to say we have three brains.

nkrisc3• 3 years ago

If I were to go blind, I suspect I would be the same person afterward (or at least no more different than I would be had I retained my sight). If I lost an arm, I'd still be me, just a me controlling one less arm.

At risk of getting philosophical, you would not be the same person afterwards. You'd be You Without Sight, but you were You With Sight before you went blind. I wouldn't expect a drastic change (your taste in music or political views may not change), but I think is fair to say you would be changed somehow.

I believe that who we are, as a person, is an emergent property of our entire body as well as our environment.

mharig4• 3 years ago

Even losing a finger can result in heavy phantom pain.

I have a friend who losed a part of his leg, and he complained for many years about pain.

I think if you separate all peripheral nerve connections from the brain, it will shut down immediately.

version_five• 3 years ago

I don't belive weren't closer to sentient intelligence than we were when babylonians started counting on tablets.

But it seems pretty intuitive that intelligence can exist outside the body. If you suddenly lost your body and had your brain in a computer that could receive audio and video input, couldn't you still act? What if you had no senses and just had info fed into your mind for reflection? I understand the idea of "embodied intelligence" and that sensory awareness is a big part of our intelligence, but I don't see why it would need to be mandatory to be intelligent.

noiv• 3 years ago

Three thoughts: first people in hospitals constraint to mostly their bed loose IQ points by the day lacking physical interactions, second I'd assume it's about developing intelligence and third I can easily imagine the Internet and its technical restrictions plus its users and their behaviour as some kind of body, useful to let a AI train itself on and achieve goals.

But actually I fear the possible outcomes.

bitwize2• 3 years ago

What if you had no senses and just had info fed into your mind for reflection?

Metallica - One.mp3

Serious answer: you'd hallucinate like crazy. A brain deprived of sensory information starts generating its own. Over long enough periods of time, like the protagonist of "One" you might go mad and wish for someone to end it all.

hackinthebochs• 3 years ago

The key is to figure out what features of our history are critical and which are accidental when it comes to intelligence. Seeing as our access to the outside world, and even our own body, is mediated by way of electrical impulses that conceptually come apart from our body suggests that embodiment is not crucial.

foobarian• 3 years ago

The most interesting phenomena tied to this to me are various unconscious/semi-conscious states like sleep or anesthesia. Clearly we have the ability to induce these using simple chemicals. Also from medical data we know what happens when brains are damaged or altered.

Veedrac• 3 years ago

Counting also also didn't develop in a vacuum, then get poured into the body; counting was developed equally evolutionarily and equally in response to physical interactions of a person to the world. But as photosynthesis works too outside the cell, provided exterior force and the motive to produce it there when the bio-evolutionary one is taken away, so too are algorithms a real thing that have real properties distinct and separable from the mysterious vital energies that housed their evolution.

bitwize2• 3 years ago

I remember a Hackernews wondering if people who were "born paralyzed" might have intellectual disabilities as well, and the answer appears to be yes. One of the things that came out of Papert's Logo research was the benefits to kids with severe motor disabilities: by setting things up so they could drive the turtle around, they had much better grasp of spatial relations between objects than they otherwise would. Being able to manipulate a proxy in the real world (the turtle) allowed them to explore those spatial relations in ways they couldn't with their physical bodies and that's critical to our cognitive development.

hosh• 3 years ago

There's this fun little article here proposing the spider web as an external extension of intelligence for the spider: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-thoughts-of-a-spiderweb-2...

I think it's worth distinguishing intelligence from consciousness (and sentience).

jutrewag2• 3 years ago

Well that’s like saying a model needs all kinds of inputs and training data but once it is trained it’s not portable. That’s just not true. Post training the intelligence is separable.

olalonde2• 3 years ago

Anything else feels like mind-body dualism to me.

It seems you misunderstand what "mind-body dualism" means then. Mind-body dualism is basically a supernatural belief that the mind exists independent of physical reality. For example, dualists believe that an AI, which is based on physical computing systems, can never possess a mind. Believing that intelligence can arise from a physical process (e.g. a computer chip) is the opposite of that.

It's unclear to me whether you actually subscribe to the dualist view but someone who believes that intelligence can arise from a computer chip does not.

goatlover2• 3 years ago

Not necessarily, because functionalism where the substrate doesn’t matter can be viewed as a form of dualism. Particularly if we’re talking about animal intelligence and mind uploads. You can see the more extreme forms of this sort of dualism in sci-fi when minds are swapped between bodies, or someone’s mind is transferred to a computer or robot.

Also, dualism doesn’t require supernaturalism. It just requires there be more than one kind of fundamental stuff. There’s no logical principle saying nature has to be only one kind of substance or process. Many modern philosophers who are dualists are also naturalists. Chalmers for example, is a property dualist regarding conscious states (qualia).

Also, one can be a neutral monist, believing that mind and matter emerge for a neutral substance that is neither. Maybe a Kantian would defend something like that? Anyway, philosophy has many options regarding dualism, mind and matter which aren't supernatural. You can even be an idealist and a naturalist. You just think the physical world is material ideas in minds.

hulitu• 3 years ago

I'm a little surprised to learn that some people believe intelligence can be separated from the body.

Just look at politicians for examples. /s

Tozen• 3 years ago

As technology progresses, it will probably be possible to scan human brains and make digital copies. With the digital copies, and further study, at some point humans will likely fully decode and know exactly how brains work.

At that point, there isn't any magic or mystery. You can create androids who are as equally intelligent as humans. Maybe we will place some limits or restrictions on them, as safeguards, but no telling how that will work out as time goes by. We might not be too far away from such a day, relatively speaking. Maybe it will take another 25 to 50 years. But it looks like we will get there, if we don't self destruct before then via nuclear war or some other catastrophe.

rrgok• 3 years ago

I don't know if intelligence can be separated from the physical body, or the other way around. Maybe the body emerged out of intelligence. Like nails emerges form the skin, so is the physical body. Maybe it took millions of year of evolution for that intelligence to build a physical body capable of sustaining and expressing itself. Maybe it is not yet done.

Just a thought experiment.

FrontierPsych• 3 years ago

Do you have any proof that it can't be done? Because otherwise you are making an opinion.

It's like saying that people can't fly. Maybe we cannot do it with wings, but we do it nonetheless.

But we have only started this age of more and more knowledge over the last 100-150 years, and it is logarithmic and the curve is getting steeper and steeper with each year. Who knows what will be possible in another 150 years? As far as I'm concerned, I'm 100% convinced that by 2050, you'll be able to put your brain on a chip and we will use robots and inhabit robot bodies to travel around, just download our program into the robot's body.

sicromoft• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/v5LjK

pelorat• 3 years ago

Awareness of self and of your own mind doesn't require a body, nor feelings for that matter. Human intelligence is actually limited by evolution and our meat bodies. It's quite evident that it's possible to engineer a mind more intelligent than evolution can ever hope to produce. Evolutionary intelligence is limited by biology.

frogperson• 3 years ago

I don't think intelligence can be separated from a body. Intelligent beings exist to fight entropy. They have a body that feels things like pain, pleasure, and hunger which lead to actions that minimize or maximize those feelings.

ChatGPT and the like, might have senses like sight or hearing, but those systems are not acting on any kind of self preservation basis. They arent fighting entropy to exist.

Once the machines feel hunger, fear, pain and so on and can use their learned knowledge to act in their own self interest then I think we can call them intelligent. I feel like a "body" of somekind is a requirement for pain and pleasure, but who knows? Im certainly not willing to make any predictions.

kelseyfrog• 3 years ago

I prefer subtractive models when discussing this topic as it leads to faster conclusions.

What's the minimum number of sensory disablements a person could undergo before they were unable to be intelligent?

If the question is absurd, it's precisely because the framing it operates - the embodiment dilemma - is ill-posed.

pessimizer• 3 years ago

The question doesn't make much sense. A body is a ton of inputs and a ton of outputs, and some processing in the middle. You can separate the processing, but that would be as pointless as raising a brain in a tank from infancy.

The process of training modern AI is basically simulating a body for an algorithm, except the feedback models get isn't as consistent as physics is, so legacy intelligence has an advantage.

Models learning how to draw from physical metaphors would strengthen their language ability through analogy; imo understanding a thing moving through space and time is the primary thing public examples haven't completely figured out.

villgax• 3 years ago

I feel like intelligent beings can be raised regardless of language, sight, hearing, voice or a combination thereof. The guardrails to not die in the first few development years(epochs) is what carries us humans into adulthood with job specific specialist education

samstave• 3 years ago

Well, if politics is any measure, then clearly the answer is yes.

thro1• 3 years ago

Intelligent intelligence is encoded in DNA ("so many knobs"): becoming, experiencing, learning, seeing, for some walking just from birth. Being sentient and conscious for sure help a lot, it took quite time too - but why the medium (the best I can imagine BTW) shall be the limit ? Good luck!

jarchamb• 3 years ago

Intelligence is the capacity to direct our behavior in the face of external circumstances and events. The more it integrates rational thinking, emotions, intuitions and acquired knowledge, the more we are intelligent. This is all contained into the workings of the brain. Even the "extended" cognition is only using previously created artifacts to enhance our memory, the same as we use books. As for identity, it is perceived from inside as we build a model of ourselves. We test our thoughts with feedback we gather. Our identity evolves with experience and incidents. The systemic identity of an individual is its uniqueness in the collective, and is observed from the behavior of the individual in selective circumstances. Nobody ever discovers the entirety of the identity, which only exists at the boundary between inside and outside, that is not observable from either points of view.

Can intelligence be separated from the body?

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