alt Hacker News> The claim that books know things seems suspicious to me
I didn't say the book knows things, but everyone can agree that books has knowledge in them. Hence something possessing knowledge doesn't make it intelligent.
For example, when ancient libraries were burnt those civilizations lost a lot of knowledge. Those books possessed knowledge, it isn't a hard concept to understand. Those civilizations didn't lose intelligence, the smart humans were still there, they just lost knowledge.
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cess11 • yesterday at 7:10 PM
"I didn't say the book knows things, but everyone can agree that books has knowledge in them."
I disagree with this. I also disagree that civilisations are knowing, since they are historical fictions. It's like saying that Superman is.
What are your arguments?
Would you consider taking a dump and then butchering an animal and then eating without washing your hands first, to be an issue of intelligence or knowledge?
The whole thing about washing hands comes from (some approximation of) germ theory of illness, and in practice, it actually just boils down to stories of other people practicing hygiene. So if one's answer here isn't "knowledge", it needs some serious justification.
Expanding that: can you think of things that are "intelligence" that cannot be reduced like this to knowledge (or combination of knowledge + social expectations)?
I think in some sense, separating knowledge and intelligence is as dumb a confusion of ideas as separating "code" and "data" (doesn't stop half the industry from believing them to be distinct thing). But I'm willing to agree that hardware-wise, humans today and those from 10 000 years ago, are roughly the same, so if you teleported an infant from 8000 BC to this day, they'd learn to function in our times without a problem. Adults are another thing, brains aren't CPUs, the distinction between software and hardware isn't as clear in vivo as it is in silico, due to properties of the computational medium.