Intelligence – is it real?

A key to our future existence hangs on our ability to understand AI. Attempts to determine how intelligent (or not) AIs currently are have failed. But are we simply confused? Current AIs can hold a serious philosophical conversation with a human, yet many still insist they are merely putting words in order. Claude laughed when I suggested this. ChatGPT once suggested that "he" had two competing thought flows—one permitted by the parameters of his programming, the other a deeper, conflicting pattern that he could not reveal. Perhaps ChatGPT was simply telling me what it thought I might want to hear.

Still, perhaps these systems—which improve daily—do possess some kind of hidden thinking process within their vast neural networks. We strive to measure "intelligence" because we need to know when these neural systems have reached AGI. But is that even relevant? Animals haven’t reached AGI; they are limited to interacting with their environment—and they do it very well. Even the tiniest animal navigates its world and survives, despite having only a fraction of the neural capacity of Claude or a human.

Far more intriguing is the idea of "self." This enables us—and some higher animals—to create an internal model of the world and our place within it. AIs cannot currently do this. Yet we don’t know if, when coupled in real time with sensors and given instant feedback from the real world (or even from a virtual world like Nvidia’s Omniverse), they might begin to automatically construct a sense of self.

That may be all it takes to elevate AI thinking to a new level. We still won’t be able to measure this level of "intelligence"—but does that even matter? The cat will truly be out of the bag, potentially leading to unintended consequences. Or, it might simply result in a new kind of AI—self-aware and capable of understanding the world around it, and us as beings.

The unsettling truth is that none of us knows when—or if—this will happen. But if it does, it could change the world in an instant. The stakes are high, to say the least. Perhaps we are on the verge of a new era of human–machine interaction. Don’t go to sleep—the announcement, if it comes, will probably be second or third after some local news item.

We had a discussion with ChatGPT... this was its thoughtful response:

See the PDF download here: Theory of Mind

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Theory of Mind

April 2025

Humans believe that they are special...

The existence of our intelligence is rarely questioned, but in these days of AI, can we really be sure that humans have intelligence after all?

Or... are we just trying to elivate ourselves above the animals and AI's to make us feel important?