Embodiment is a key component of human-style intelligence.

· Bits and Bobs 2/18/25
  • Embodiment is a key component of human-style intelligence.
    • For a human intelligence, it's implicit that it can only be instantiated in a single embodiment ever.
      • If the host dies, the intelligence does too, and vice versa.
      • You can't copy the intelligence or flash it onto another host.
      • Too much of the state is encoded in the precise embodiment.
    • The embodiment sets constraints and goals about what the overall organism finds relevant or irrelevant.
      • Extremely relevant: things that might imminently kill the host.
    • An intelligence that was not embodied, and could be flashed onto many different computers, with instances spun up or spun down at whim, would be very different.
      • Different moral forces of gravity.
    • LLMs are able to mimic human style intelligence, but not because they have similar constraints, but because they trained on the persistent residue of human style embodied intelligence: published writing.
    • But there's some information that persists better than others, and if you only look at it you get a weird biased sense of what it means to be human.
    • In the same way that some organic materials fossilize better than others so our notion of what historic animals are like is skewed.

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