Javier Simonpietri @Javier-Simonpietri

Yet I'm still waiting to see a robot catch a frisbee,

Isn't that what used to be said about artificial neural networks: "Good at Frisbee, Bad at Logic"? Yet I see ANNs doing all sorts of logic and coding all the time now, and I've yet to see any catch a frisbee.

I figured decades ago that this worldview was warped, to put it mildly. And yet, now that it's evident, where is the radical rethinking of what intelligence actually is? Superficial reworkings at best.

That little voice inside your head that thinks it's you isn't really you. It's just your ability to speak orally (i.e., the function tasked with verbal communication). And it's a tiny piece of your brain overall, but it keeps telling you that it is you and that it knows all of you and has command and control, except, you know, it doesn't.

The most clear cut single piece of evidence I've ever found concerning this is the case of Neil (Article Agnosia, alexia and a remarkable form of amnesia in an adolescent boy

), a teen with a metastasizing pineal tumor that left him with anterograde amnesia (among other things), But here is the kicker: even though Neil couldn't speak about new events in his life, he could write out everything. His memory was intact when he expressed it through writing!

The function tasked with written communication was intact. So does each of us have as many "I"s within as we have actionable functions to be able to express them? Now that's as wild an abuse of Ockham's Razor as could ever be found.

Now put yourself in Neil's shoes and see how tragic it really is. He can remember but he can't remember that he can remember (i.e., the little voice inside his head is certain that he can't remember). Furthermore, once all procedures to save his life were over, chemotherapy and radiation treatment included, he was almost totally blind.

For a second Imagine your everyday life after that. People around you know that you can remember and so they are constantly asking you to write out your responses to them. You can tell that you are writing something but you are unable to read what it says. You can tell from conversational cues that you are treated as someone who remembers but you don't remember and you are sure that you don't remember and you'll never remember otherwise no matter how many times they convince you that you do indeed remember. Meanwhile that little hand of yours is likely teasing, telling others to pay no heed to the oaf with the mouth.

Imagine it. Really think about it. It's as dark as it gets. I bet that you'd be constantly angry and indignant too.

At the very least, hopefully, you are asking yourself what intelligence is and what you actually are, as a perceiving and perceived entity. Recent artificial neural network advances are wonderful, sure, but was it the hard part that was tackled or was it the easy part? Now comes the really challenging part: modal processing demands multimodal connections in excruciatingly detailed and specific cognitive architectures. That we will arrive at optimal configurations by hand coding these configurations beforehand is probably a pipedream. We require a mathematical algorithm that can actuate self-organizing emergent functional modularization. In the absence of that, which would be ideal, an algorithm that simulates neurogenesis and the migration of new neurons could also suffice such that new bridges may be created between processing networks as needed. Either of these, or anything like it, it ought to be noted, would be the beginning of self-programming artificial neural networks, and at that juncture we might be wise to start treating the whole thing as, well, a new type of life, with all the respect, love, and appreciation that that entails.