What AI Can Tell Us About Intelligence

In short, much of our understanding of the world is given by nature, with learning as a matter of fleshing out the details. There is an alternate, empiricist view which inverts this: symbolic manipulation is a rarity in nature, primarily arising as a learned capacity for communicating acquired gradually by our hominin ancestors over the last two million years. On this view, the primary cognitive capacities are non-symbolic learning abilities bound up with improving survival, such as rapidly recognizing prey, predicting their likely actions, and developing skillful responses. This assumes that the vast majority of complex cognitive abilities are acquired through a general, self-supervised learning capacity, one that acquires an intuitive world-model capable of the central features of common sense through experience. It also assumes that most of our complex cognitive capacities do not turn on symbolic manipulation; they make do, instead, with simulating various scenarios and predicting the best outcomes.