What Is Strong AI?

I am diving into research to try to create strong AI. I am not a fan of Machine Learning, or at least what I have seen of it. Probabilistic methods that don't try to understand the complexity of the underlying problem but label it as "randomness" are setup to approach the problem wrong.

Yet, the question as to what human-equivalent intelligence would look like is almost impossible to answer. What is intelligence? I won't try to answer that here. In fact, as you can probably see if you're reading this on a large enough screen, this is a short article. So let's drop human-equivalent for human-comparable and forget about intelligence altogether. Instead, let's think about language.

I would like to build a discursive machine; one that converses with human enough methods that one has the feeling there is someone on the other end and that is interesting enough that it's statements develop with experience. What do I mean by "interesting"? I mean complex, reorganizing, patterned, etc., but the truth is I don't quite know yet. If I knew a rigorous answer to what I meant by "interesting", I would know where to begin looking for first steps. As it is I have a couple of hunches, and those are where I will begin.

It's as simple as this: I want something similar enough that I can empathize with it, complex enough that it seems to think, and alien enough that it runs on human-built technology.

Thus I begin my search.

Where Does Objectivity Lie?

What would a universe with objective truths look like?

The answer could easily be "Such a reckoning is beyond human imagination.". But I don't think so.

Imagine a creature capable of thought, whose thought processes are incredibly simple. In fact there is only one thought this creature can think. We here arbitrarily define that thought as the concept of identifying something as true. This creature would, for itself, have an objective truth. We can easily define such a creature as rigorously as is desired by its molecular make-up. We can simply choose any arrangement of molecules and define it to be such a creature.

Yes, it's rather arbitrary. Would it make you happier if the creature had some kind of model in its head and some notion of reality? What about a creature very much like us, in fact exactly like us, but every time it consciously accepts a new idea it says too itself "That really makes sense." no matter how contradictory such an idea is in our valuation of things. Such a creature would experience an objective "truth", no matter how much one is unable to empathize it.

There is something in us, however, that makes us reject such a model. It is our inability to empathize with such creatures. Yet is truth validated by general empathy? Hardly. Truth is only self-validated. Our rejection comes from our impression of what truth should be. And of course we can define truth to be something that's generally empathizable, but that breaks a lot of the notions of personal truth that we are deeply invested in as well. The truth is, we mean many different things by this word truth, but it seems to me that it always originates from the interpreter of the word.

I can't "prove" such a statement, since I have thrown away the concept of truth, but I can ask you to empathize with the fact that for us to agree that something is a truth we must do exactly that: agree. Before you agree that something is true, you must put your impression of the phenomenon through the interpreter that is the sum total of your mind, which can be described as you comparing the issue at hand with your own version of "truth".

It seems to me, from this angle, that the possibility of objective reality lies in the subject.