So what would a real comparison of intelligence with something else look like? I think the question “Is intelligence good?” is not that meaningful.
What we can do is ask “is there a way to X given only Y” For instance “is there a way to make a fire, given only the ability to contract mucles of a human body in a forest?” or “is there a way to destroy the moon, given only the ability to post 10k charicters to lesswrong.com?″ These are totally formalizable questions and could in principle be answered by simulating an exponential number of universes.
I agree with the first statement but not the later.
Unless we can ask “Is something good”, than why would we consider that subject to be important ?
Most thing that we hold to be of value, we do so because they are almost universally considered good (or because they are used to guard against something that’s universally considered bad).
We can certainly ask “Can <manipulation Y of class ABC of T-cell> be <good> ?” and we could get a pretty universal “Yes, because that will help us cure this specific type of tumor and this specific type of tumor, when viewed through the subjective lens of any given animal, is bad”.
We can then say there are a wide variety of tasks and goals that humans can fulfill given our primitive action of muscle contraction. Given that chimps have a similar musculature, but less intelligence and can’t do most of these tasks, and many of the routes to fulfillment of the goals go through layers of indirection, then it seems that an intelligence comparable to humans with some other output channel would be similarly good at achieving goals.
Again, here I think your analogy suffers of the problem I was trying to tackle, you are taking a human-centric view and assuming that chimps are inferior in the range of actions they can take.
Chimps can do feats of acrobatics that seem fun and impressive, with seemingly little risk and effort involved. I would love to be able to do that ? Would I love that more than being able to, say, not die from cancer since I have chemotherapy ? Or more than being able to drive a car ? I don’t know… I can certainly see a valid viewpoint that being able to spend my life swinging through trees in the Congos would be “better” than having cars and chemotherapy and the other 1001 wonders that our brains help produce.
I agree with the first statement but not the later.
Unless we can ask “Is something good”, than why would we consider that subject to be important ?
Most thing that we hold to be of value, we do so because they are almost universally considered good (or because they are used to guard against something that’s universally considered bad).
We can certainly ask “Can <manipulation Y of class ABC of T-cell> be <good> ?” and we could get a pretty universal “Yes, because that will help us cure this specific type of tumor and this specific type of tumor, when viewed through the subjective lens of any given animal, is bad”.
Again, here I think your analogy suffers of the problem I was trying to tackle, you are taking a human-centric view and assuming that chimps are inferior in the range of actions they can take.
Chimps can do feats of acrobatics that seem fun and impressive, with seemingly little risk and effort involved. I would love to be able to do that ? Would I love that more than being able to, say, not die from cancer since I have chemotherapy ? Or more than being able to drive a car ? I don’t know… I can certainly see a valid viewpoint that being able to spend my life swinging through trees in the Congos would be “better” than having cars and chemotherapy and the other 1001 wonders that our brains help produce.