The article’s main assertion: “Better metrics reveal that general intelligence is continuous: “More is more,” as opposed to “more is different.””<p>Incorrect. There is a qualitative difference between instinct and intelligence, and all current models are instinctual rather than intelligent — narrow rather than general.<p>Instinct utilizes knowledge; intelligence produces knowledge. Instinct is deterministic and brittle; intelligence is creative and fluid.<p>The critical discontinuity between instinct and intelligence is located at the divide between non-conscious and conscious. Although there are varying degrees between semi-conscious and fully-conscious, there is no continuum from non-conscious to conscious. Qualia is not continuous — it exists (is experienced) or it does not exist.<p>Intelligence, as we experience it, and as we know it, exists only as a side-effect of the conscious experience of qualia. In truth, intelligence is a side-effect of consciousness, or to be more precise, an exaptation of the modeling of other minds driven by the evolutionary pressure of being socially dependent creatures (mostly mammalian). See “Consciousness and the Social Brain” by Michael Graziano.<p>Humans aren’t actually all that intelligent at the baseline: we require societies help in becoming educated and learning tools such as writing and arithmetic. It takes hard training to turn our conscious experience into an intelligent experience capable of solving problems. Many, if not most, people never become even somewhat capable of rigorous critical thought, let alone grammar and algebra.<p>Intelligence is an accident of conscious experience, in that consciousness grants a capacity for creativity of knowledge that does not exist in non-conscious entities. Knowledge has one source: consciousness.<p>This is why your dog or cat, as dumb as they are, still learn how to get what they want from you, whether a walk or tin of tuna.<p>Without going down the rabbit-hole of metaphysics, we can definitively state that conscious beings have access to a state of information unavailable to non-conscious entities — that of qualia. Qualia can be thought of as the ultimate data structure — infinitely combinatorial and extensible, in that qualia by their nature beget qualia. It is this inherent creativity that accidentally leads to what we consider general intelligence.<p>We may not understand the hard problem of consciousness, but there is nothing in our obviously material existence that precludes us from generating artificial consciousness, and thereby producing the environment in which general intelligence can manifest itself.<p>The concrete metric to train artificial consciousness is simple: maximizing a model’s ability to predict its self and its antagonists, and minimizing a models’s predictability by its antagonists. This metric is a relational-social metric that leads to the creation of a consciousness of self and others, laying the foundation for the engine of knowledge that we call intelligence.