Assuming you're talking about AGI/consciousness/intelligence, then whether you're right depends on what you mean above by saying that "you cannot solve the problem".

- If you mean "you cannot EXPLAIN AGI/consciousness/intelligence if you don't understand it", then that's true, but it's a trivial tautology.

- If you mean "you cannot DEVELOP AGI/consciousness/intelligence if you don't understand it" then that's very debatable.

Historically we have been able to develop all kinds of things, despite not knowing how they work. Tinkering and trial and error is often enough.

After all that's how evolution solved the problem of creating consciousness/intelligence. There wasn't some entity that "understood" intelligence that created it.

The most difficult thing, which everyone in all these discussions try to avoid, is that we don’t even have a universally agreed upon definition for the words AGI, consciousness or intelligence. Let’s just agree to define what we’re talking about first before we start arguing about what’s possible or not regarding those undefined terms.

I don't think it's much of a showstopper either. Not having a "universally agreed upon definition for the words AGI, consciousness or intelligence" haven't prevented us from considering other people conscious and intelligent, or animals conscious, etc. It wouldn't preclude us considering an alien race coming to earth as conscious and intelligent either.

Sort of how we didn't have a "clear definition" of most things for millenia, but we still were able to recognize them as a class of thing. It's more of a "I'll know it when I see it" kind of thing.

And the external behaviors (of consciousness and intelligence) matter more than "but is it really conscious/intelligent inside" when considering some AGI as such. After all we neither can clearly define, not we know or can measure what's going on inside another person's head regarding consciousness, or to be frank, not even on our own head. When it comes to us, we just have a subjective experience, and not even a very clear one at that.

Evolution didn't understand a darn thing, and yet it created us.

Evolution is how the universe works. We are the universe.

referring to the parent post, you seem to imply that evolution had a "problem" to which "creating us" was the solution. which to me isn't obvious at all. chance seems a perfectly satisfactory explanation for now

> you cannot solve a problem you don't understand.

Well that's not true. We tamed fire before understanding combustion, friction, heat, or anything else.

All that's needed to "tame fire" is to have a predictive-enough model of fire dynamics and a suitable method for constraining its state space. There's nothing that requires "understanding" in the scientific sense, only in the pragmatic sense.

Sure, so maybe all you need to solve intelligence is also a pragmatic approach, like datasets generated by a known intelligence from which a general learning function can infer associations.