• poVoq
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    2 years ago

    Mostly the same arguments I heard before, but it is true that dinosaurs for example were not “less” evolved then mammals and thus it is strange that apparently none ever developed human-level intelligence in those tens of millions of years that they dominated earth.

    Well… it is possible that some did reach human-level intelligence, but that they never culturally developed after that beyond a hunter-gatherer society and thus left nothing behind that we could identify after all these millions of years. After all even modern-humans spend by far most of their (short) existence as hunter-gatherers and we know very little about that despite how recent that was.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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      2 years ago

      In my view, it’s not about whether humans are more or less evolved than other animals, and I don’t think human style is inevitable. Cats are a great example of an incredibly successful adaptation that works in a wide range of environments. Primates simply landed on a different kind of adaptation than most animals. One path is to develop physical traits that allow organisms to thrive in their environment. Meanwhile, another approach is to evolve big brains that can create complex models of the environment and use those to manipulate the environment. The main advantage of the latter approach is that each individual organism can itself adapt to novel conditions.

      This approach also facilitates a much faster rate of information transfer than physical evolution. Instead of information being passed down genetically, it can now be directly communicated from one organism to another. And invention of writing allows this information to be stored externally leading to information being rapidly accumulated and shared.

      Human mind is basically a platform that gets bootstrapped through language. Most of the knowledge humans have doesn’t come from direct experience, but it’s rather taught using language.

      Interestingly enough, a process similar to evolution is happening in memetic space. Different world models compete with each other, and provide a different picture of reality. We each subscribe to a particular world model of reality. Some of these are broadly compatible while others are completely at odds with each other. When the models diverge we often end up with conflict. So, in a sense we’re seeing natural selection playing out in the space of ideologies.

      It makes perfect sense that humans spent most of their existence in hunter-gatherer tribes because Initial stages of an exponential look fairly linear.

      If there were other organisms with human style intelligence previously, then those would most likely have seen the same kind of technological growth that we see because technology is driven by our ability to accumulate and transfer information. While it’s likely that nothing would remain from a previous advanced civilization, there would be indirect indicators such as surface accumulation of metals that they mined, and so on. People have actually considered this seriously before.

  • @gun@lemmy.ml
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    32 years ago

    I wonder if there’s a higher level of intelligence that is physically possible, but just wasn’t favored by natural selection. The brain is such a masterpiece as is, it’s hard to imagine improving it.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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      22 years ago

      I don’t think there’s any reason why higher intelligence wouldn’t be possible, we just got to the bare minimum needed to create a technological civilization at which point there hasn’t been much selection happening for further our intelligence. One of the core features of intelligence is the ability to extrapolate future states based on the present state of things and act on that in a way that benefits you and your species. We’re currently failing at this task collectively.

      Our knowledge allows us to operate on a scale that’s affecting the entire planet. Yet, our understanding is still limited to that of animals that used to live in small tribes in a largely static environment. When we lived in the wild, our primary concerns were to make sure we had enough food to eat for the day and that we didn’t get eaten ourselves. Nowadays, we need to have a much longer term perspective because our actions have huge global impact.

      Unfortunately, humans primarily act based on emotion as opposed to reason. Anything we do is ultimately driven by the urges we feel. We eat when we’re hungry, we sleep when we’re tired, and so on. These are basic regulatory instincts that evolved over billions of years and predate things like language and rational thought. We are animals first and foremost no matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise.

      This aspect of human psyche makes it very difficult to prioritize long term problems over short term ones. People can understand that horrible things will happen ten to twenty years down the road if we don’t act on climate change, but they don’t want to make sacrifices that will make them uncomfortable today in order to avert that. Reducing your current level of comfort goes directly against all the instincts while future you that will suffer feels like an abstract problem. We have far more emotional attachment to the present than we do to the future. So instead of dealing with large scale problems we rely on our eternal optimism to convince ourselves that things will magically work out in the future.

      Improving our brains to be able to favor longer term perspective over the short term one would be one obvious upgrade in human intelligence.

    • poVoq
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      2 years ago

      It is probably near a local optimum, with a few areas still to improve when taking away some other evolutionary constraints. But to really improve it significantly my guess is that a totally different approach would be needed.