We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.
But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.
This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.
So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).
Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.
Yes there there as many types of intelligence as there are types of problems. Emotional intelligence deals with emotional problems, social intelligence deals with social problems. This doesn’t conflict with my definition, it’s still problem solving.
Just because a being is intelligent does not mean it can solve all the problems of all kinds, it would require general intelligence, and even a generally intelligent being needs the right training… if you are trained wrong or trained for a different kind of problem that does not fit the current one then your current experience might actually get in the way, as you point out.
Slime mold can solve mazes.
Yes, that’s what I meant 2 comments above by “fungus” (though to be fair, whether slime molds are fungi depends on your definition, they used to be classified as one, before “protist kingdom” was made up to mix protozoa, algae & molds, but I keep preferring the traditional autotroph / absorptive heterotroph / digestive heterotroph division).
I also mentioned ants who can find the optimal path by simply following scents left by other ants without understanding how this helps with that.
You can be intelligent without being aware of your intelligence, or you can be stupid without being aware of your stupidity… like how humans are actually creating problems for themselves in many cases.
Intelligence != awareness
If your definition of intelligence doesn’t include awareness it’s not very useful.
I don’t know, I feel it’s actually the opposite. Awareness is something you can only experience subjectively, it’s “qualia”, a quality that you cannot measure outside of yourself or detect externally. There’s a reason IQ (“intelligence” quotient) tests use puzzles/problems and don’t test conscious awareness. Most of the time in science intelligence is defined as problem solving and capacity to adapt/extrapolate because that definition makes it observable and more scientifically useful.
If it were to include awareness then we can’t in good faith answer the question: “is it intelligent?” …we can only say we don’t know. This is the main struggle of philosophy of the mind, what is often called “the hard problem of consciousness”. Empirical analysis would not show if something is having (or not) the conscious experience of being aware.
Let me rephrase. If your definition of intelligence includes slime mold then the term is not very useful.
There’s a reason philosophy of the mind exists as a field of study. If we just assign intelligence to anything that can solve problems, which is what you seem to be doing, we are forced to assign intelligence to things which clearly don’t have minds and aren’t aware and can’t think. That’s a problem.
Why is it a problem?
Generally, I’d say having clear, specific and useful definitions is a good thing to help communicate and understand what we are talking about and avoid misinterpretations.
What is the reason you think philosophy of the mind exists as a field of study?
In part, so we don’t assign intelligence to mindless, unaware, unthinking things like slime mold - it’s so we keep our definitions clear and useful, so we can communicate about and understand what intelligence even is.
What you’re doing actually creates an unclear and useless definition that makes communication harder and spreads misunderstanding. Your definition of intelligence, which is what the AI companies use, has made people more confused than ever about “intelligence” and only serves the interests of the companies for generating hype and attracting investor cash.
There are many philosophers of the mind that agree that intelligence and consciousness are separate things.
Some examples are Daniel Dennett and John Searle.
There are also currents of thought in philosophy of the mind that disagree that even things like “slime mold” are mindless. Both in the direction of materialism and in the direction of idealism.
Most philosophers of the mind would disagree that “the reason” for their field to exist really has anything to do with that. I’d say it has more to do with curiosity and the interest for seeking truth. Like most fields of philosophy do.
I’d argue it’s your definition, which includes consciousness, what makes AI an attractive term for investors. Precisely because you want Intelligence to include consciousness and it can lead to people assuming that AI is conscious.
Promoting your definition helps the interests of the companies who want to generate hype, and causes just as much confusion as you attribute to mine in that regard.
At least mine is simpler, less vague and makes it easier to dismiss the misunderstanding, since if intelligence isn’t consciousness then AI isn’t consciousness. A lot of philosophers have agreed with that, for years, long before LLMs were a thing. John Searle for example is famous for the Chinese room experiment.