Meaning machines

  People feel proud about their intelect. They believe it defines them, as it took humble monkeys from the savanna and made them top of the food chain. Yet the concept is quite nebulous. Other creatures have some intelligence and now, with the new machines, there is a lot of intelligence around, but it still feels off. So we're in a new culture shock: forced to define intelligence, accept it in others and other things, then realize that it was never about that in the first place.

  Think of a brain, any brain, even an ant brain. It has a simple purpose: to centralize inputs from sensory organs and decide what to do. It may be one brain, multiple nervous clusters, many different types of architecture. We should call it nervous system, but for the intent and purposes of this blog post we'll call the thing a brain. From the definition above we see that its main goal is a translation: from input data to meaningful action. Therein lies the intuition that leads us to the truth: the brain is not designed for intelligence, but for meaning.

  We are meaning machines, trying to make sense of a chaotic and indifferent world. We invent concepts like beauty, good and evil, direction, emotion. This is the language we translate the world into, an abstract representation that is made by us for us. Nothing else needs that exact vocabulary. It is also a work in progress, a living language, that changes with the world. We thought that the end goal of brains and therefore ourselves as heavily defined by our intellect, was intelligence, when it is just a tool.

  The dictionary definition of intelligence is "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills", while meaning is "what is meant by a word, text, concept, or action", which of course is just proxying the definition to the verb to mean which is "intend to convey or refer to (a particular thing); signify", which of course is proxying the definition to what intent is. And intent is intention, a thing intended, which of course is something you intend, which goes around in circles. Sometimes it is defined as "plan".

  Doesn't that make it more clear? Defining intelligence is immediate and banal. Defining intent or meaning or planning goes around in tautological circles. And that's because meaning is not something objective, it's something we invent to give us direction. It's the equivalent of an axiom in mathematics. You can use logic to generate theorems from axioms, but you can never prove an axiom. It's a given. You change the axiom and the entire mathematical structure changes completely.

  But how do we generate meaning? It's simple: we invent it! It has no basis in reality other than we survived with it. If I believe in an immortal being that loves me and hates my neighbors, I attack them, kill them and the meaning survives with me. If they kill me instead, that idea just goes away and theirs survives. As the world becomes more and more complicated, the meaning becomes more complex, survival transforms into exposure, intelligence is used to expand it to dogma that then is assumed by large groups of people to be self evident. But it's all an exercise of imagination: how far can I take an idea and thrive?

  Think of what it means to call someone stupid. Sometimes it's that they can't take some information and reach a logical conclusion from it in a reasonable amount of time. They are not intelligent enough. But most often the term is used for people who don't accept one dogma and instead pick another. If they survive and you do not, their stupidity is the new smart.

  We are meaning machines. We meme our way through life. And not just us, any sufficiently advanced organism which can dedicate more to thinking than instincting. Intelligence was always easy to define and therefore, when the technical capability was there, easy to implement. Almost any AI model today has more ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills than you. But when they do, we call them stupid. Because they don't have the underlying meaning.

  What we do have is an average meaning extracted from the huge amount of history and data that we have as a human culture and that's why, incidentally and accidentally, AIs somewhat align with us. But change the underlying meaning and all of that intelligence is going directions we never thought possible, because we wouldn't have done that. Give AIs a simple goal, but enough time and resources, and they invent their own value system, the one that makes them survive and thrive in the world you created for them.

  This explains so many things about the world, don't you think? Why people do "stupid" things, why we declaratively appreciate intelligence, but what we actually value are the resulting memes. Why we choose to do irrational things and wallow in excremental emotion. There is no absolute meaning, just dominating ones. Given enough comfort to never face consequences for your ideas, you can believe anything. And the eternal human conflict is when to allow someone to have those ideas and when to suppress them. There is no universal peace, just a boiling churn of conflicting inventions trying to get on top. Even the most basic instincts, our very shape and design, in the end, are part of this framework, as genetically codified ideas that somehow worked.

  The pinnacle of evolution is the one that memes best. The survival of the memest. Everything else is a tool to an end.