Re: Intelligence and wisdom

From: Cliff Stabbert (cps46@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Jul 17 2002 - 15:13:51 MDT


I wonder if in these discussions of intelligence vs. wisdom, we're not
leaving out an essential component of the distinction: namely, human
psychology with its conscious vs. subconscious, id/ego/superego,
shadows, complexes, anima and all the rest of it.

Perhaps when we say of someone that they're intelligent but not (yet)
wise we really are referring to a lack of congruence between their
explicit stated goals and their "actual" (subconscious) goals, as
evidenced by their behaviour. I put "actual" between quotes because
the situation is of course far more complex than that.

Question: would you predict that an AI at some point during its
moral evolution will 'have' some similar substrate for internal
struggle? I am presuming most expect a super AI to be perfectly
congruent*, with no internal contradictions, but am asking a question
about how it gets to that point.

* Actually, I'm starting to strongly question this myself. Even in a
system as simple as Hofstadter's CopyCat, one can point to conflicting
drives, drives at different levels of abstraction, etc. There appear,
to me, to be fundamental reasons why self-consciousness of necessity
cannot include the whole system. Taken together, this would appear to
imply at the least a differentiated 'ego' with some underlying less
consciously accessible (or at least, accessed) motivations, and
possibly a differentiated 'subconscious' as well.

--
Cliff


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