And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. [The ability to process Functional information (FI)] Genesis 2:7
"The defining characteristic of human General Intelligence (GI) is not simply reasoning ability or the accumulation of knowledge. It is
the ability to generate genuinely new functional capabilities — capabilities that no previous human (or other system) could perform and therefore could not have simply been acquired through training.
At first, this way of thinking about AGI may sound unconventional. Yet remarkably, it is consistent with how leading AI researchers describe AGI. Not long ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, while discussing AGI with physicist David Deutsch, proposed that an AI would definitely qualify as AGI if it could “…figure out quantum gravity and could tell you its story.”
Notice what makes this example compelling. It is not simply that the AI possesses vast amounts of information. A library can contain vast amounts of information without being intelligent.
--Therefore, the defining characteristic of a generally intelligent system (or AGI) is not that it can perform existing functions, but that it can generate new functional capabilities that were not initially part of the system and were not transferred from another system that already possessed them.
But this immediately raises a deeper question: What allows any system to acquire capabilities it did not previously possess?
Q: What explains the origin of life?
Q: How does information convey meaning?
**A living cell is not remarkable because it contains molecules. It is remarkable because those molecules collectively perform metabolism, replication, and countless other biological functions.
**Likewise, a generally intelligent system is not remarkable simply because it stores information.
Information itself only becomes useful when some system can use it to perform a function.
**Information is not meaningful simply because it exists or because it is improbable. It becomes meaningful only if there exists a system that can interpret it and use it to perform a function.
Functional information (FI).
We can describe it as FI (I, S, F), where:
I is the information.
S is the system interpreting that information.
F is the function the system is able to perform.
Functional information is information that a particular system must correctly interpret and use to perform a particular function.
Remove any one of these three components and functional information disappears."
GeorgiosMappouras