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166 9 General Intelligence in the Everyday Human World

Under the assumption of the Embodied Communication Prior (with the Natural Knowledge Categories assumption), the property above called “cognitive completeness” is necessary and sufficient for efficient general intelligence at the level of an intelligent adult human (e.g. at the Piagetian formal level [Pia53]).
Of course, the above considerations are very far from a rigorous mathematical proof (or even precise formulation) of this hypothesis. But we are presenting this here as a conceptual hypothesis, in order to qualitatively guide our practical AGI R&D and also to motivate further, more rigorous theoretical work.

9.3.1 Generalizing the Embodied Communication Prior

One interesting direction for further research would be to broaden the scope of the inquiry, in a manner suggested above: instead of just looking at the ECP, look at simplicity measures in general, and attack the question of how a mind must be structured in order to display efficient general intelligence relative to a specified simplicity measure. This problem seems unapproachable in general, but some special cases may be more tractable.
For instance, suppose one has

• a simplicity measure that (like the ECP) is approximately decomposable into a set of fairly distinct components, plus their interactions
• an assumption similar to NKC, which states that the entities displaying simplicity according to each of the distinct components, are roughly clustered together in entity-space

Then one should be able to say that, to achieve efficient general intelligence relative to this decomposable simplicity measure, a system should have distinct capabilities corresponding to each of the components of the simplicity measure interactions between these capabilities, corresponding to the interaction terms in the simplicity measure.
With copious additional work, these simple observations could potentially serve as the seed for a novel sort of theory of general intelligence – a theory of how the structure of a system depends on the structure of the simplicity measure with which it achieves efficient general intelligence. Cognitive Synergy Theory would then emerge as a special case of this more abstract theory.

9.4 Naive Physics

Multimodal communication is an important aspect of the environment for which human intelligence evolved – but not the only one. It seems likely that our human intelligence is also closely adapted to various aspects of our physical environment – a matter that is worth carefully attending as we design environments for our robotically or virtually embodied AGI systems to operate in.
One interesting guide to the most cognitively relevant aspects of human environments is the subfield of AI known as “naive physics” [Hay85] – a term that refers to the theories about the physical world that human beings implicitly develop and utilize during their lives. For instance,

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