According to http://lesswrong.com/lw/d27/neuroscience_basics_for_lesswrongians/ you’re at least partially correct. People don’t seem to actually have generalized intelligence hardware that controls everything, rather they have specialized regions of the brain that excel at certain tasks. We might have generalized hardware in addition to our specialized regions, but our specialized regions still control a lot.
But this is not the same thing as it being that intelligence MUST only exist in specific islands, or that general intelligence couldn’t exist, or doesn’t exist in the abstract. I think that pattern recognition in general is a skill very useful in lots of domains. Additionally, there’s no way that humans have evolved separate modules for each of these individual tasks: inventing firearms, doing mathematics, tying knots, solving jigsaw puzzles, writing poetry. So it’s probably safe to believe that general intelligence is a thing that exists, in some sort of form. Or, at least, that some of our specialized regions have a lot of versatility.
According to http://lesswrong.com/lw/d27/neuroscience_basics_for_lesswrongians/ you’re at least partially correct. People don’t seem to actually have generalized intelligence hardware that controls everything, rather they have specialized regions of the brain that excel at certain tasks. We might have generalized hardware in addition to our specialized regions, but our specialized regions still control a lot.
But this is not the same thing as it being that intelligence MUST only exist in specific islands, or that general intelligence couldn’t exist, or doesn’t exist in the abstract. I think that pattern recognition in general is a skill very useful in lots of domains. Additionally, there’s no way that humans have evolved separate modules for each of these individual tasks: inventing firearms, doing mathematics, tying knots, solving jigsaw puzzles, writing poetry. So it’s probably safe to believe that general intelligence is a thing that exists, in some sort of form. Or, at least, that some of our specialized regions have a lot of versatility.