Human intelligence is symbolic in structure in its anthropological genesis of cultural civilization as knowledge based adaptive systems.
The symbolic structure of all possible human knowledge constitutes the inviolable principle of the anthropological relativity of our knowledge, worldview and cultural systems foundation, both in terms of the behavioral structure of its cognitive processes as well as in the uniquely anthropological nature of its symbolic linguistic processes of social communication and interaction.
This guarantees that not only can we think outside the systems evolution designed for humankind, but also that no other system can think inside our evolved box of worldview and belief. This begs the consideration of cross-species communication and also whether or not we may devise systems that not merely extend and develop our thinking and knowledge frameworks in the world, but also advance our cognitive capacities.
We cannot neglect this consideration and yet arrive at a clear, concise and empirically realistic understanding of the problem of human intelligence as well as the outgrowth of artificial (applied systems) “intelligence” that is becoming increasingly autonomous and sophisticated with the global development of human civilization as a “cyber-anthropo-sphere.”
Contemporary sophisticated AI models and programs are rooted in digital-based computer pattern-recognition of human language organization and process as a large-scale social phenomenon. Machine pattern recognition serves in its sophistry the analogous function of human intuition. If it demonstrates nothing else, then it demonstrates the sophisticated replication of the productive patterning of human speaker linguistic intuition. We as human beings receive this computer generated feedback in terms that mimic intuitive comprehension. These computer response patterns are the outputs of our digitized prompts or language-based inputs.
People achieve cognitive apprehension and intuitive understanding as a result of the interaction of the experience of human memory with natural language apparatus.
We must ask now whether the advance of AI does not depend greatly on the future capacity to mimic and build in digital form an analog world (and worldview) in which human beings are enculturated and socialized to naturally and seamlessly operate and interact within human systems.
Especially we must inquire into the functional isomorphism of digital “deep neural networks” and the neural network foundations of the human brain and especially of its cognitive organization for symbolic language comprehension. In other words, human intuition and the intuitive foundations of human language, knowledge and understanding and insight, may in fact be the generative spin-off, however productive and infinite in its exploratory possibilities, of normal neural mechanical organization and human brain functioning that is organized around symbolic language processes.
Very soon it seems, the Turing Test alone may no longer be the universal standard for evaluating hard or functional artificial intelligence. In fact, in its own future performances, digital “bots” may outstrip human intellectual functioning in many forms and ways information manipulation that patterns human knowledge systems beyond bare human capacities for symbolic productivity.
At that significant stage we can either capitulate and admit that computational systems are hard or at least mechanically or functionally intelligent, or else we can revise our criteria of evaluation to reflect cognitive-symbolic sentience of the individual human being bound as always things will be to a human constructed world symbolic in structure.
We can perhaps look forward to a future world order in which artificially intelligent robots quickly learn to out-perform the cognitive functions of human beings in many different undertakings and patterns of knowledge organization and expression. What will people then do?
Perhaps they can devote themselves to a world of work in which work is not based upon the alienation of humankind but upon its celebration in terms of the arts, the humanities, religion, philosophy and science, leaving much of the rest of the work to sophisticated machines that remain machines nonetheless in terms of the one feature all people share—their intuitive and mutual sentience of being and understanding.