wedrifid comments on My Wild and Reckless Youth - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 August 2007 01:52AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (51)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: wedrifid 08 October 2012 02:28:34PM 0 points [-]

Hmm. I notice that I was not as specific as you are. I didn't say anything about what "most" life forms would be like or whether there would be lots of smart life forms.

We may also have meant different things by "if life on earth evolved". I read it as "conditional on self replicating things we could call 'life' emerged on earth, how would I expect things to proceed" where it could also have meant "conditional on intelligent life like we know it having been evolved, how would I expect that process to have gone".

What I was intending to convey was not so much that one stable form of goo would remain permanently but rather that there is a significant component of the great filter in the stages between life emerging and general-intelligence evolving as well as the component before life emerges at all. I expect that most planets where life evolves at all to not evolve general intelligence or even other lifeforms as interesting as what we consider lesser animals. I expect it to get stuck in local minima rather frequently.