Wanting to be an ideal intelligence again

[simont]

I've mentioned before that I often find myself noticing fundamental bugs in the way the human brain works and wishing my brain was better designed.

Here's another one: my brain is often very bad at predicting how it would behave in dangerous or scary situations. It's annoyingly common for me to evaluate several courses of action in advance of an event, decide which one I like best, and then when the time comes to actually commit myself then I discover that the one I'd chosen is terribly scary now that it's actually physically staring me in the face rather than being considered as an abstract strategic puzzle.

If I were designing an ideal intelligence, I would give it a properly working imagination. It would be able to set up a hypothetical situation, put itself into that situation, and then reason exactly as if it were real. It would either be able to temporarily completely suppress the knowledge that the situation wasn't real, or alternatively it would just be able to reliably inhibit that knowledge from impinging on its reasoning processes. In fact, now I've written that either/or, I'm not entirely sure I can robustly define the difference between those two possibilities; but either way, the fundamental architecture of my intelligence would be designed in such a way that if it decided it would react a certain way in a scary situation, you could depend on it being right.

Comments

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Are you thinking of a specific thing you did?

But of course, I think we're all familiar with this behaviour. I can think of two common causes:

(a) We're overly optimistic about how well we will act
(b) We act apparently illogically in a crisis when we allow an immediate want (eg. getting further from a mugger) overrule a longer term want (eg. escaping from a mugger) because we don't have time to think, and revert to something instinctive.

We can:

(a) Consider objectively what we're likely to do, taking into account how often we and other people are right about that
(b) Practice the behaviour we want until it becomes automatic.

[simont]

<vorlon>
Yes.
</vorlon>

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

LOL. I was actually thinking Vulcan. I remember wondering what the point of Vulcans was -- they obviously had emotions (love, curiousity, etc) or why would they bother to go to strange new planets and rescue their friends? The point being, they didn't let their emotions overrule them, they were rational about how to achieve their emotional aims. Which is what I hadn't realised I ever wasn't when I was young :)