Levels of Organization in General Intelligence

Section 1 discusses the conceptual foundations of general intelligence as a discipline, orienting it within the Integrated Causal Model of Tooby and Cosmides; Section 2 constitutes the bulk of the paper and discusses the functional decomposition of general intelligence into a complex supersystem of interdependent internally specialized processes, and structures the description using five successive levels of functional organization: Code, sensory modalities, concepts, thoughts, and deliberation. Section 3 discusses probable differences between humans and AIs and points out several fundamental advantages that minds-in-general potentially possess relative to current evolved intelligences, especially with respect to recursive self-improvement. Yudkowsky, Eliezer. 2007. “Levels of Organization in General Intelligence.” In Artificial General Intelligence, edited by Ben Goertzel and Cassio Pennachin, 389–501. Cognitive Technologies. Berlin: Springer. doi:10.1007/ 978-3-540-68677-4_12. This version contains minor changes.