Philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy that attempts to account for a very difficult problem: why there are apparently two different realms of phenomena, physical and mental, that are at once tightly connected and yet as different from one another as two things can possibly be.
Broadly speaking you can think that the mental reduces to the physical (physicalism), that the physical reduces to the mental (idealism), both reduce to some other third thing (neutral monism) or that neither reduces to the other (dualism). There are many arguments for dualism but I’ve never heard a philosopher appeal to “magic spirits” in order to do so.
Dualism has nothing to do with it. There are more things on heaven and earth then just computable functions in the mathematical sense.
(In fact, the very idea of "computable functions" was invented to narrow down the space of "all things" to something much smaller, tighter and manageable. And now we've come full circle and apparently everything in the universe is a computable function? Well, if all you have is a hammer, I guess everything must necessarily look like a nail.)
Intelligence is about learning from few examples and generalising to novel solutions. Increasing compute so that exploring the whole problem space is possible is not intelligence. There is a reason the actual ARC-AGI price has efficiency as one of the success requirements. It is not so that the solutions scale to production and whatnot, these are toy tasks. It is to help ensure that it is actually an intelligent system solving these.
So yeah, the o3 result is impressive but if the difference between o3 and the previous state of art is more compute to do a much longer CoT/evaluation loop, I am not so impressed. Reminder that these problems are solved by humans in seconds, ARC-AGI is supposed to be easy.
Do you think intelligence exists without prior experience? For instance, can someone instantly acquire a skill—like playing the piano—as if downloading it in The Matrix? Even prodigies like Mozart had prior exposure. His father, a composer and music teacher, introduced him to music from an early age. Does true intelligence require a foundation of prior knowledge?
> Does true intelligence require a foundation of prior knowledge?
This is the way I think about it.
I = E / K
where I is the intelligence of the system, E is the effectiveness of the system, and K is the prior knowledge.
For example, a math problem is given to two students, each solving the problem with the same effectiveness (both get the correct answer in the same amount of time). However, student A happens to have more prior knowledge of math than student B. In this case, the intelligence of B is greater than the intelligence of A, even though they have the same effectiveness. B was able to "figure out" the math, without using any of the "tricks" that A already knew.
Now back to your question of whether or not prior knowledge is required. As K approaches 0, intelligence approaches infinity. But when K=0, intelligence is undefined. Tada! I think that answers your question.
Most LLM benchmarks simply measure effectiveness, not intelligence. I conceptualize LLMs as a person with a photographic memory and a low IQ of 85, who was given 100 billion years to learn everything humans have ever created.
