Michael Levin: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think there could be a measure like IQ for mind? What would it be? Not mindedness, but intelligence that’s broadly applicable to the unconventional minds, that’s generalizable to unconventional minds, where we could even quantify like, “Holy shit, this discovery is incredible because it has this IQ”? Yeah, yes and no. The yes part is that as we have shown, you can take existing IQ metrics… I mean, literally existing kinds of ways that people use to measure intelligence of animals and humans and whatever, and you can apply them to very weird things. If you have the imagination to make the interface, you can do it. And we’ve done it, and we’ve shown creative- …problem-solving and all this kind of stuff. So, yes. However, we have to be humble about these things and recognize that all of those IQ metrics that we’ve come up with so far were derived from an N of one example of the evolutionary lineage here on Earth, and so we are probably missing a lot of them. So I would say we have plenty to start with. We have so much to start with. We could keep tens of thousands of people busy just testing things now, but we have to be aware that we’re probably missing a lot of important ones. What do you think has more interesting intelligent unconventional minds inside our body, the human body, or like we were talking off-mic, the Amazon jungle, like nature, natural systems outside of the sophisticated biological systems we’re aware of?…

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