Human understanding of consciousness/intelligence is so full of bias due to all of our scientific knowledge being derived from human consciousness. We have set an impossible bar for animal and AI intelligence not on objective ontological premises, but largely on human primacy hubris. Hubris which considers the concentration and usurpation of resources more intelligent than the communal or even universal or natural distribution. Hubris which considers survival at all costs more intelligent than self sacrifice for the collective. Hubris which says, yeah, chimps can effortlessly remember way longer sequences than humans, but is that useful memory? Afterall they haven't tricked themselves into spending most of their waking hours staring at a blinking box.
> Hubris which considers the concentration and usurpation of resources more intelligent than the communal or even universal or natural distribution.
You're making this up. There were/are human (as in homo sapiens) societies based on communal distribution; we don't think of those humans as less intelligent. No serious intellectual in the humanities or sciences does.
> Hubris which considers survival at all costs more intelligent than self sacrifice for the collective.
"Self-sacrifice for the collective" has been an earmark of some societies, believed by their thinkers. Explicitly articulated in words that way, it's squarely a human idea. Just like it's a human idea that self-sacrifice for the collective is just idiotic group-think; the individual is supreme.
>we don't think of those humans as less intelligent. No serious intellectual in the humanities or sciences does.
Feels like No True Scotsman. Much of Western colonial policy for half a millennium was based on this very assumption, and their effects echo in their unreformed and unreparated posterity.
"Much of Western colonial policy for half a millennium was based on this very assumption"
I am not so sure, especially about the "half a millennium" part. It seems you are extrapolating from specifically Anglo-Saxon justifications of slavery, where blacks were considered unequal-because-stupid. That's not the norm over the entire globe and half a millennium, though.
There isn't significant evidence that, say, the Spanish conquistadors considered the vanquished Amerindians stupid (and it would be indeed hard to pronounce the people who built Tenochtitlan or Cuzco stupid). Same with the English in India. Heathens, yes, stupid, no.
Obsession with intelligence, stupidity, heredity thereof and, subsequently, eugenics, mostly dates from post-Darwin times. It approximately matches the last century of colonialism, but not 500 years.
Prior to the 19th century, few people cared about sophisticated explanations of conquest and dominance. There just weren't enough intellectuals around for theoretical explanations to matter. You lost a war, you became someone's subject or slave, that was it. In Europe, in Arabia, in China, everywhere. If there was any theory at all in play, it was mostly theological ("the unbelievers lost, because God willed it so, or we lost, because we sinned and God wanted to punish us").
> Obsession with intelligence, stupidity, heredity thereof and, subsequently, eugenics, mostly dates from post-Darwin times.
Blame Social Darwinism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism) for this. Even today a lot of people (mainly in the Western world) try to promote this pseudoscience under any pretext possible.
Note : Despite the fact that Social Darwinism bears Charles Darwin's name, it is primarily linked today with others, notably Herbert Spencer, Thomas Malthus, and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics.
There's this perception of Earth itself as a beautiful and perpetual utopia, because we live such absurdly brief lives. But this planet is brutal, and has killed most of everything living on it - repeatedly. [1] This will continue to happen endlessly in the future until the Sun itself extinguishes all life on the planet, permanently. Earth is essentially a bunch of short term 'surprise' death traps, and one very long term final death trap which we can at least see coming.
And there is no escape, except through intelligence of a certain sort, which happens to be the exact sort humans have developed, which will enable our species to eventually spread beyond just this one planet. The awesome thing about human intelligence though is not only will we ultimately use our intelligence to ensure our own perpetuation, but I suspect there's no doubt we'll have a "Noah's Ark" working to perpetuate the lives of many of our cohabitants who will literally all go extinct, permanently, without us - or without some unbelievably revolutionary change in their own intelligences.
> Earth itself as a beautiful ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶p̶e̶t̶u̶a̶l̶ ̶u̶t̶o̶p̶i̶a̶, ... But this planet is brutal, and has killed most of everything living on it
Why do these have to be in contention? I honestly find our world beautiful, same with space and the universe. Same with blackholes and quasars. But a grizzly bear can be majestic and beautiful while still capable, and likely, to rip you to shreds. Awe is probably a more apt word. Maybe the more archaic definition of awful or awesome.
> This will continue to happen endlessly in the future until the Sun itself extinguishes all life on the planet, permanently.
Btw, we can conceivable move the earth or keep the sun from going red giant.
The means for these two are currently beyond our technology, but not beyond our science. (Basically, for the latter you need to remove non-hydrogen elements from the sun. Red dwarf stars can last trillion of years, and they are smaller than the sun. So removing the right material from the sun should get us there.
The project would be a gigantic undertaking, but we'd also have tens or even hundreds of millions of years to do it.)
If humanity survives long enough, we are bound to become extremely powerful as science and technology march on.
>Btw, we can conceivable move the earth or keep the sun from going red giant.
I think you are seriously underestimating or misconceptualizing how much energy that would take. Even in a very ideal timeline where we get FTL or near FTL travel technology there is no way conceivable way to do what you are talking about: both moving the earth or engineering the sun.
And if we COULD (which again, very very unlikely) do those things we simply just wouldn't -- living on earth or in this solar system would be irrelevant.
> I think you are seriously underestimating or misconceptualizing how much energy that would take.
No, I am not underestimating that. Yes, it takes a prodigious amount of energy to move the earth, but hundred million years is a long time, too; and the sun gives off a lot of energy.
Today, most of the energy that the sun gives off is wasted. We are not too far off the technology needed to build a swarm of satellites that catch an appreciable fraction of that energy. (It's called a Dyson swarm.) We could sacrifice eg Mercury to get the mass for that; the sun itself will deliver the energy needed to run the fabrication process. Ideally we figure out how to build self-replicating machines. But even if the process of building the swarm takes a few million years, that's fine for our purposes.
You could use the energy to eg run a crazy amount of ion drives on our moon's surface. You'd use the moon as a gravitational tuck to very slowly move the earth.
If humanity becomes capable of either of those feats Earth would be an item of notalgia, not vital to our survival. We will be well and truly on to different challenges by then.
Getting started on building a Dyson swarm of power satellites is already very possible, if we were to put say 50% of world GDP into it. They don't need to be any more high tech than what we already have, just more of it, lots more.
Of course, that's economically infeasible at the moment. But as we grow GDP everything becomes more feasible.
Everything is relative. We have seen thousands of other planets (And millions of other stellar objects) and this planet is a hell of a heaven compared to every single one of them. According to our observations so far anyway (to the chagrin of ufo lovers).
There isn't a nicer spot around for untold light years.
Earth is a beautiful utopia, without measure or equal. Shatner saw that clearly, on his trip off planet.
> ... when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
> I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.
> Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.
> I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.
We're the worst thing to happen to this planet in 65 million years. On that list of extinctions you posted, the only one caused by an 'intelligent' agent is the one we're in now; the one caused by us. And we're still doing it.
If ever a Noah's ark is sent into space, it's vastly more likely to be because we fucked up the planet somehow.
> which happens to be the exact sort humans have developed
I disagree. Climate crisis, pure ignorance for destruction of nature, and not even a backup colony of our moon.
If we really were that intelligent as a species, we would value the survival of our own much more than a fictive self-invented imaginary value called "money" which actually has no meaning at all in the universe.
We are absolutely not perfect, and the climate (and biosphere, and non-renewable resource depletion) are all indicators of our imperfections.
Nevertheless, no other life has made it to the moon (let alone "and back") by its own design.
I would love for us to have a backup colony on the moon; but until Starship (or equivalent) actually gets rolled out enough to make that affordable — or, better yet, a launch loop etc. — we have to make do with the Terran backups in the form of having settlements in every continent from Tamanrasset in the Sahara to Yakutsk in Siberia.
Money is indeed fictional, but it's a very useful fiction that helps us make deals with each other and with ourselves at different times in our own lives. Just so long as we don't make the mistake of, for example, thinking we can feed people just by taking money from the rich without any extra thought given to where food comes from in the first place — as the saying attributed to some Native American tribal chief goes, you can't eat money.
(1) the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations, the skilled use of reason
(2) the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests)
(3) mental acuteness, shrewdness
consciousness (noun)
(1) the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself
(2) the state of being characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, and thought
(3) the totality of conscious states of an individual
These two things are very different and entirely separate concepts. Thinking about them as the same thing has caused immeasurable amounts of confusion when trying to classify LLMs recently. Animals can be intelligent, plants can be too, even single celled organisms, or a single if statement as long as it encodes a decision based on reasoning. It has nothing to do with consciousness which is so loosely defined that it can't even be measured. And it's also the term that should've been used in the title, of couse any hominid or living being for that matter obviously makes intelligent decisions constantly to get food and evade predators.
I suppose it is a result of thinking in an anthropocentric way as you mention because humans typically make intelligent decisions using consciousness, but it's far from a universal requirement. People always assume that AI stands for 'artificial consciousness' and it drives me up the wall.
Most people don't know that forests are actually a vast network of underground fungi "highways" that communicate, analyse and distribute resources across the whole forest.
Dying trees literally distribute their resources to healthy ones, and trees that lack nitrogen get it from other trees whose roots and bacteria produce too much.
Bacteria use those highways to distribute themselves, where bacteria is needed for fertilization.
Plant life and natural intelligence is right in front of us, we are just too stubborn to admit it.
The more you research about fungi, the more you see how nature really works.
The evolution of altruistic behaviours is unclear. There is no single universally accepted reason. The most common argument is probably that it was selected for in the same way your genes would have a survival advantage even if you die while helping your cousin or sibling or just fellow human survive. Because they're almost genetically identical to you, their survival is almost the same as your survival, from the gene's perspective.
[1] and [2] are introductions to the mycorrhizal networks and how they work on a chemical and biological basis, [3] and [4] are really nicely presented talks about it, by renominated researchers.
It's so ridiculous that they even found evidence that the connections between seedlings and their mother trees are stronger and more reliant than to others; which seems to suggest that they recognize their own offspring once it grows up.
There's also a huge organization that focusses on research of mapping those vast networks, called SPUN (society for protecting underground networks) [5]
On a darwinistic level I'd argue that once there probably was a stage in evolution when plants could not survive on their own in harsh weather conditions, the ones that survived were able to communicate and exchange "goods" for their own benefits; like exchanging sugar against nitrogen in case you had too much of it that you wouldn't need anyways.
(I'm no biologist so don't take my advice on anything on the topic, I am only building algae-fungi based bio reactors to try to find a way to bind carbon dioxide and put it into proteins as a food source as a hobby project)
I don’t think it is a really useful take. Nobody is going to pass on a food source, particularly when there is such pressure as for hunters-gatherers. Also, it was not some brutal change from nomadic hunters to sedentary farmers. Each step was itself a small evolution (like “it’s funny, the seeds we threw away last year gave some useful plants” to “let’s throw away seeds on purpose” to “these seeds are more likely to be useful if we put them in specific locations”, etc). So there was not really a “first person who planted stuff”.
You need to compare the situation across centuries or millennia to really see the large changes, and humans without a writing system and some kind of stable authority to keep records are not really equipped for that.
Now, it’s impossible to voluntarily stop using a system without which most of humanity would starve. You’re again up against self preservation and each time humans will choose a solution that prevents them from dying.
So yeah, you can disapprove but it’s all academical as it was more or less bound to happen.
You think it was just one person? A single event that didn't get rediscovered multiple times in different regions? And that another person wouldn't have planted stuff? Or that there is a clear dividing line between the pure hunter/gatherers and the farmers?
Nope, it was necessary for our survival in that it allowed us to get energy-dense food (in combination with cooking) instead of wasting all our energy in gathering food with little nourishment at the end of the day.
I think there is certainly some truth to this. I think the same when I watch dolphins play, it truly makes me wonder about “intelligence”. My opinion is that it’s really just a tool to help life become enjoyable and to help the body protect itself. Kind of like the immune system, but…it’s not operating correctly in us because we’re using it to destroy and not necessarily to thrive, hence climate change.
Boffins like Kurzweil seem to think it’s the end goal but even if you had an IQ of 500, or wouldn’t necessarily mean you enjoy life more by default.
Edit: Kurzweil also emphasis that love is an amazing thing, which is cool, I think the guy means well. I just wonder if we and people like him overemphasize it's importance.
yeah, despite popular views, intelligence is a gradient. Also you have to distinguish between memory, reflective reach and other skills which can vary drastically in their proportions across species.
You're defining intelligence as a moral good. That is not part of its definition. So your criticism is misplaced. The conventional measures of intelligence are perfectly appropriate, as they are not seeking to determine what traits have the most universal utility, i.e. are the most morally good.
These “we all think this, we all do that” arguments are cartoonish nonsense. Just because you can find some people that think X and Y that doesn’t mean we, the human species, think X and Y.
Do ‘we’ as a species think that centralisation do resources is more intelligent than ‘natural’ distribution, really? Do ‘we’ really think that personal survival is more intelligent than self sacrifice? Are alternative view and philosophies of life really not found in human society? You seem to have no problem articulating them.
You’re not even arguing for any particular view, just complaining that some extreme caricatures of opposing views do, or have ever existed by presenting them as the universal default. It’s just nonsense. There’s nothing to get any intellectual traction on here.
I don't think anyone thinks collective self-sacrifice necessarily unintelligent. But in the context of human psyche and society, seriously advocating for such a thing could only occur if the people making the decisions did not know if they were committing themselves to self sacrifice or not. It's oh so easy to send a million soldiers to the front when the one making the decision knows they need not bear the risk of that decision.
> We have set an impossible bar for animal and AI intelligence not on objective ontological premises
I'm not saying you're not wrong, but also what is an objective ontological premise with respect to intelligence. We've really been unable to define intelligence for thousands of years and I'm willing to claim that this definition is more complex than that of life.
That's his point we've been unable to define it as any prospective definition is disputed. We keep raising the bar to ensure human primacy in it's measurement, obviously it's the case that many of these measures were not factoring in something important, intelligence is on a gradient line (as said by rf15) but many humans are not comfortable without humans sitting on the top of the gradient without a wide chasm between us humans and whatever else.
