dlthomas comments on Why an Intelligence Explosion might be a Low-Priority Global Risk - Less Wrong

3 Post author: XiXiDu 14 November 2011 11:40AM

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Comment author: timtyler 14 November 2011 04:39:27PM *  0 points [-]

The last two points are different though: Intelligence can engage in direct, systematic experimentation. Evolution in contrast only experiments in so far as it happens to stumble across things.

So: direct experimentation by animals is part of Skinnerian learning - which is hundreds of millions of years old. The results of the experiments go on to influence the germ line of organisms via selection. Would you claim that that is not part of "evolution"?

Similarly, while you are correct about symbiosis to a limited extent (and there are also examples of horizontal gene transfer), intelligence can look at another solution and without happening to pick up genes or forming a symbiotic relationship can go simply steal a functional strategy.

Right - so I agree that differences in evolution are developing a result of the development of engineers - but observing and incorporating the "solutions of other optimizing agents" doesn't really capture the difference in question. Imitating the strategies of others is hardly a new development either - animals have been imitating each other since around our LCA with songbirds - that too is an ordinary part of evolution.

Comment author: dlthomas 14 November 2011 05:07:27PM 0 points [-]

So: direct experimentation by animals is part of Skinnerian learning - which is hundreds of millions of years old. The results of the experiments go on to influence the germ line of organisms via selection. Would you claim that that is not part of "evolution"?

This smells funny.

Comment author: timtyler 14 November 2011 06:25:56PM *  -2 points [-]

Sure: it conflicts with the popular misunderstanding of evolution being "blind" - and without foresight.

Comment author: dlthomas 14 November 2011 06:40:52PM 1 point [-]

Pinning it down a little, the part I object to is:

The results of the experiments go on to influence the germ line of organisms via selection.

It is trivially true that any change will have an influence, chaos theory and all. It seems unlikely that this influence will in any way relate to the results of the experimentation, in terms of production of variance or difference in heritability. Yet this seems to be what you are hand-wavily suggesting, without backing it up with math.

Comment author: timtyler 14 November 2011 06:50:16PM *  0 points [-]

It seems unlikely that this influence will in any way relate to the results of the experimentation, in terms of production of variance or difference in heritability. Yet this seems to be what you are hand-wavily suggesting, without backing it up with math.

We do know a fair bit about that. The idea is that it influences the germ line via selection.

If you perform experiments and the result is that you die - or fail to mate - the selective mechanism of information-transfer into the germ line is obvious. Milder outcomes have less dramatic effects - but still result in information transfer. The phenomenon has been studied under these names:

If we go as far as humans there are also things like: Biocultural evolution.

That learned information and genetic information were aspects of a more general underlying phenomenon was observed by Semon (1904) and later there were pioneering contributions by B.F.Skinner - for example in Selection by Consequences. Skinner explicitly based his theory of learning on Darwin's theory of evolution. The idea was refined further in Dennet's Tower of Generate-and-Test.

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