gwern comments on Open Thread: December 2009 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: CannibalSmith 01 December 2009 04:25PM

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Comment author: byrnema 02 December 2009 06:59:37AM *  0 points [-]

A poem, not a post:

Intelligence is not computation.

As you know.

Yet the converse bears … contemplation, reputation. Only then refutation.

We are irritated by our fellows that observe that A mostly implies B, and B mostly implies C, but they will not, will not concede that A implies C, to any extent.

We consider this; an error in logic, an error in logic.

Even though! we know: intelligence is not computation.

Intelligence is finding the solution in the space of the impossible. I don’t mean luck At all. I mean: while mathematical proofs are formal, absolute, without question, convincing, final,

We have no Method, no method for their generation. As well we know:

No computation can possibly be found to generate, not possibly. Not systematically, not even with ingenuity. Yet, how and why do we know this -- this Impossibility?

Intelligence is leaping, guessing, placing the foot unexpectedly yet correctly. Which you find verified always afterwards, not before.

Of course that’s why humans don’t calculate correctly.

But we knew that.

You and I, being too logical about it, pretending that computation is intelligence.

But we know that; already, everything. That pretending is the part of intelligence not found in the Computating. Yet, so? We’ll pretend that intelligence is computing and we’ll see where the computation fails! Telling us what we already knew but a little better.

Than before, we’ll see afterwards. How ingenuous, us.

The computation will tell us, finally so, we'll pretend.

Comment author: gwern 12 December 2009 03:05:46AM *  2 points [-]

While reading a collection of Tom Wayman's poetry, suddenly a poem came to me about Hal Finney ("Dying Outside"); since we're contributing poems, I don't feel quite so self-conscious. Here goes:

He will die outside, he says.
Flawed flesh betrayed him,
it has divorced him -
for the brain was left him,
but not the silverware
nor the limbs nor the car.
So he will take up
a brazen hussy,
tomorrow's eve,
a breather-for-him,
a pisser-for-him.
He will be letters,
delivered slowly;
deliberation
his future watch-word.
He would not leave until he left this world.
I try not to see his mobile flesh,
how it will sag into eternal rest,
but what he will see:
symbol and symbol, in their endless braids,
and with them, spread over strange seas of thought
mind (not body), forever voyaging.

http://www.gwern.net/fiction/Dying%20Outside

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