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pedanterrific comments on Open thread, November 2011 - Less Wrong
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I find this comment extremely puzzling. How do you suppose an intelligent species could go about building nuclear bombs without the ability to use tools?
The relevant kind of "ability to use tools" is whatever can be used, however inefficiently at the beginning, to start building stuff, if you apply the ingenuity of an international scientific community for 100000 years to the task; not appendages that a chimp-level chimp can use to sharpen sticks in an evening. You seem to underestimate the power of intelligence.
This is directly analogous to AI boxing, with limitations of intelligent creatures' bodies playing the role of the box. I'd expect intelligent tortoises or horses should still be capable of bootstrapping technological civilization (if they get better than humans at rationality to sustain scientific progress in the initial absence of technological benefits, or just individually sufficiently more intelligent to get to the equivalent of the necessary culture's benefit in a lifetime).
There are a lot of species that are almost as smart as humans, and some even engage in tool use. (e.g. many species of corvids). But their tool use is limited, and part of the limit appears to be their lack of useful appendages and comparatively small size. In at least some of these species such as the New Caladonian Crow, tool techniques can be passed on from one generation to the next. This sort of thing suggests that appendages matter a fair bit.
(Obviously they aren't sufficient even when one is fairly smart. Elephants have an extreme flexible appendage, have culture, are pretty brainy, and don't seem to have developed any substantial tool use.)
Elephants or crows don't have scientific communities, so the analogy doesn't work, doesn't suggest anything about the hypothetical I discussed.
Humans developed tool use well before we had anything resembling the scientific method or a scientific community. Humans had already 2000 years ago become the dominant species on the planet and had a substantial enough impact to make easily noticeable changes in the global environment. Whatver is necessary for this sort of thing, a scientific community doesn't seem to be on the list.
You are missing the point still. The question was whether the presence of appendages convenient for tool-making is an important factor in intelligent species' ability to build a technological civilization. In other words, whether creatures intelligent enough to build a technological civilization, but lacking an equivalent of hands, would still manage to build a technological civilization.
Elephants or crows are irrelevant, as they are not smart enough. Human use of tools is irrelevant, as we do have hands. The relevant class of creatures are those that are smart and don't have hands (or similar), for example having bodies of tortoises (or worse).
Hmm, I'm confused now about what you are trying to assert. You are, if I'm now parsing you correctly, asserting that a species with no tool appendage but with some version of the scientific method could reach a high tech level without tool use? If so, that doesn't seem unreasonable, but you seem to be conflating intelligence with having a scientific community. These are not at all the same thing.
In the situation where you have smart folks with no ability to build tools, scientific community is one useful technology they can still build, and that can dramatically improve their capability to solve the no-hands problem. For example, I wouldn't expect humans with no hands (and with hoofs, say) to develop technology if they don't get good enough at science first (and this might fail to happen at our level of rationality in the absence of technology, which would be the case in no-hands hypothetical). As an alternative, I listed sufficiently-greater individual intelligence that doesn't need augmentation by culture to solve the no-hands problem (which might have developed if no-hands humans evolved a bit more, failing to solve the no-hands problem).
That sufficiently greater intelligence without hands could succeed is a supposition that seems questionable unless one makes sufficiently greater to be so large as to see no plausible reason it would evolve. And a scientific community is very difficult to develop unless one already has certain technologies that seem to require some form of tools. A cheap and efficient method of storing information seems to be necessary. Humans accomplished that with writing. It is remotely plausible one could get such a result some other way but it is tough to see how that could occur without the ability to use tools.
If creatures figure out selective breeding, one way to solve the no-hands problem would be for them to breed themselves for intelligence...
Well, I expect educated humans could pull this off (that is, assuming development of science/rationality).
An oral tradition of scholarship seems sufficient for all practical purposes, on this level of necessary detail, if reliable education is sustained, and there is a systematic process that increases quality of knowledge over time (i.e. science and/or sufficient rationality).