Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences
This article and the Overcoming Bias post it links to (&quot;Better Babblers&quot;) remind me of when I was in high school and was reading stuff like <i>Gödel, Escher, Bach</i> and Dawkins&#x27;s <i>The Selfish Gene</i> (the two first books I ordered after mom allowed me to use Amazon) while also learning online about Wittgenstein and statistical text generation (Markov chains). All this led to a kind of crisis of identity because in their own ways all those things point to a deconstruction of the self.<p>That sounds hokey, but to explain briefly: GEB indicates that your self (your consciousness of being someone) is a swirling self-referential symbolic process (a &quot;strange loop&quot;); Dawkins indicates that your self is a kind of evolved meme whose function in nature is to further your family of genetic replicators; Wittgenstein indicates that your self is a habitual user of language where deep meaning is not as important as social function; and Markov chains indicate that your self&#x27;s use of language can be modeled at least to a rough approximation by extremely simple statistics.<p>So I clearly remember wondering &quot;Am I just a kind of slightly more advanced Markov chain?&quot;<p>I think this is also the unsettling core question of <i>Blade Runner</i>: are we also artificial?<p>I wonder what theologians might say about this question.