A Fresh Argument

"Thomas," who accused me of being a Vitalist in an earlier turn of my waltz with the false, now accuses me of being a Vitalist:

From all this crap I only see, that Dale is a kind of vitalist.

He has no fresh arguments for his cause.

From all this crap I only see that Singularitarians are reductionists. They have no fresh arguments for their cause.

I'm not positing any kind of mysterious supernatural force in the way that the vitalists did. I'm pointing out that for so-called materialists you sure have an odd way of discounting the non-negligible material incarnation of actually-existing intelligences (on the basis of which alone you can have formed the notion of an emulable intelligence in the first place, given that they are the only actual game in town), and an odd way of discounting many dimensions associated with the actual exhibition of intelligence in the world (which include more than just cognitive reckoning with consequences but also sensitivity, imagination, empathy, emotionality, expressivity, savvy, instinct, improvisation, and a conscience that cannot be reduced only to calculation).

You can discount this objection as woo-woo mysticism if you like, but it looks to me like pointing out errors, one materialist to another. I daresay that dead-enders in the always only endlessly failed predictive powerhouse of the Strong Program might wonder what they keep on missing all these years to account for the interminable flummoxing of their certainties.

It's hard to resist the overwhelming sense that at least some Robot Cultists are willing so to substitute a vision of mere amplified calculation for actual intelligence because that reduction enables them to tell a more plausible story that would connect current technoscientific knowledge with the technodevelopmental accomplishment of the outcomes with which they identify so fervently as a community: Namely, first, the arrival of the superintelligent post-biological Robot God who either is Friendly enough to solve all their problems or Unfriendly enough to end the world altogether, as well as, second, the arrival of a "mind-uploading technique" through which their mortal vulnerable error-prone bodily selves can "migrate" into an imperishable digitality in which superintelligence, superlongevity, and superabundance is finally theirs.

Needless to say, whatever the actual sensible programming and science onto which they are glomming in crafting these formulations, this discourse is not itself a scientific one at all, but a discourse connecting selective experience to moral, aesthetic, and political hopes and calling upon older mythic archetypes and theological discourses. This is why it is sometimes handy to have a rhetorician in the house, amidst the breezing buzzing confusions of fixated coders.

UPDATE: "Roko" jumps in, responding to "Thomas's" attribution to me of "vitalism," suggesting instead:

He seems to be using the word “intelligence” in non-standard way.

But I'm simply using it in a way that captures the way you use it and experience it in your actual life. There is more to intelligence than reckoning with consequences.

Hereupon "Roko" soldiers on, hoping craftily to corner me into the reductionist cul-de-sac in spite of myself, apparently:

you concede that the human mind is a planner-reasoner-problem-solver-speaker-learner,

Among other things.

albeit a more effective one than any currently existing computer program in most domains

"Effectiveness" isn't all intelligence is up to. It also is up to "meaningfulness." And some of the ways in which it finds its way to "effectiveness" connect up to the ways in which it finds its way to "meaningfulness."

Whatever Wikipedia says at the moment on the subject, however fervently you might deny the salience or substance of the dimensions of intelligence to which I refer, I can no more deny them myself than I could deny the pressure that deforms the surface of my fingertips and the slick contact with surface that meets each strike of the keyboard out of which this reply is forming on the screen before my eyes right here, right now.

and that the property of being a planner-reasoner-problem-solver-speaker-learner is a purely algorithmic property which is substrate independent

I don’t think we know that at all yet, and I very much doubt it in any case. Setting aside abstruse philosophical quandaries I might have with such an effort at abstraction and reduction, let's turn instead to considerations I suspect you'll take more seriously (that isn't a compliment): To what extent was the substance of what is entailed at least in part by what you mean by “planner” “problem solver” and so on incarnated in the squishy organismic brain through evolutionary processes having to do with vicissitudes in the environmental idiosyncrasies threatening the survival or enabling the flourishing of the organisms to which we are indebted for the intelligent brains we actually now have? Intelligence isn't math, it's a squishy sloppy-wet mess, like a kiss.

That aside, I definitely won’t have you reduce the word “reasoner” to number crunching (however "pure" in your revealing terms). Reason is a far more capacious word in my book. For heaven’s sake, humanity is the Aristotelian rational, that is also to say, political animal!