I’m fairly new here, and very definitely not an AI ‘insider’. But it sems to me that the approach to rationality promulgated here is strongly influenced by experience in thinking about what and how AI might be.
As someone who aspires to rationality, I find much of interest, and much to chew on, as I look around.
This post has crystallised a feeling I was getting that the approach taken here is perhaps fixated on a certain sort of mechanistic rationalism—of the type assumed in many game/economics theoretical approaches.
The example that launches the post is fatally undermined by the philosophically and experientally obvious point (and luckily for me, a point which is increasingly based in the science that comes from using fMRI) that the decision taken was NOT a rational decision. It was largely taken by the unconscious (I prefer pre-conscious, for the same reasons that you dislike the word ‘emergent’ - unconscious has come to be a mystical term—and that is not what I intend).
Rational behaviour is a mode of behaviour—one of many. The reason that increased rationality among humans is desirable is that it is a mode that is almost never practiced. We are—like it or not—creatures with an only lately evolved capacity for rational thought of any kind. Almost everything that we can be or do, can be achieved without rational thought (if I ever get the nerve to write a post in this forbiddingly precise atmosphere, I may be able to make this seem less tendentious).
Thus the impact of rational thinking has been out of all proportion to its prevalence. Rational behaviour is like the one-eyed man who is king in the nation of the blind. But for the one eyed man to declare that anything not encompassed by sight is irrelevant or dangerous would not be optimal for his subjects.
So I end up thinking, with regard to progress in artificial intelligence (without the slightest expectation of originality), that if research is focussed on ‘artificial rationality’, then any recognisable ‘intelligence’ is unlikely to result.
Excellent post—and excellent advice.
I’m fairly new here, and very definitely not an AI ‘insider’. But it sems to me that the approach to rationality promulgated here is strongly influenced by experience in thinking about what and how AI might be.
As someone who aspires to rationality, I find much of interest, and much to chew on, as I look around.
This post has crystallised a feeling I was getting that the approach taken here is perhaps fixated on a certain sort of mechanistic rationalism—of the type assumed in many game/economics theoretical approaches.
The example that launches the post is fatally undermined by the philosophically and experientally obvious point (and luckily for me, a point which is increasingly based in the science that comes from using fMRI) that the decision taken was NOT a rational decision. It was largely taken by the unconscious (I prefer pre-conscious, for the same reasons that you dislike the word ‘emergent’ - unconscious has come to be a mystical term—and that is not what I intend).
Rational behaviour is a mode of behaviour—one of many. The reason that increased rationality among humans is desirable is that it is a mode that is almost never practiced. We are—like it or not—creatures with an only lately evolved capacity for rational thought of any kind. Almost everything that we can be or do, can be achieved without rational thought (if I ever get the nerve to write a post in this forbiddingly precise atmosphere, I may be able to make this seem less tendentious).
Thus the impact of rational thinking has been out of all proportion to its prevalence. Rational behaviour is like the one-eyed man who is king in the nation of the blind. But for the one eyed man to declare that anything not encompassed by sight is irrelevant or dangerous would not be optimal for his subjects.
So I end up thinking, with regard to progress in artificial intelligence (without the slightest expectation of originality), that if research is focussed on ‘artificial rationality’, then any recognisable ‘intelligence’ is unlikely to result.