= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
juked07 comments on The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (233)
But how you imagine that would work? How will a longer timespan help?
Let's picture that we literally took 10 000 top human engineers and scientists, with all our human knowledge, into dolphin bodies, on another planet with no human artefacts. So, our dolphin people now need to somehow develop a way of writing down their knowledge underwater, which they can only do very laboriously because they haven't got hands. They can write very large letters with immense energy expenditure per letter. They can barely store any knowledge. They also got short lifespan and sharks to worry about.
And on the tools side, you need tools that are good enough so you can use them to make better tools. That generally requires ability to harden things - make something while it's soft, let it harden, use something softer to crack apart something harder. And to get that started, you need hands, because without hands you can only make the kind of tools that doesn't help you make better tools.
If you can't make an improvement in any single generation, you can't make any improvement in a thousand generations either.
Meanwhile, a planet populated with those same scientists and engineers in human bodies - hell, dog bodies, cat bodies, elephant bodies - would've had it all sorted out in no time. They'd have steel, electricity, running water, radio, and so on, in less than a generation - hell even 10 people can do that.
(assuming they all cooperate).
The gap due to the body shape and environment appears utterly immense. The only hope would be that dophins would evolve much greater than human intelligence and come up with something that we can't come up with (e.g. mind controlling some animal with hands).
edit: That is not to say a small number of top scientists and engineers would single handedly create industrial manufacturing, but that is to say they would re-create pre-industrial village level technology and then hand-make many important bits of 20th century technology. You can take a 16th century blacksmith's forge and make an electric generator in there, a spark gap transmitter, a coherer receiver, a carbon arc lamp, and the like, using most basic materials and hand manufacturing techniques. Indeed that's how the early instances of all those things were made - by a small number of top engineers, often in their spare time, without advance knowledge.
This strikes me as very human centric. Why should another species' hypothetical ascension look so much like the one we happened to observe in humans?
If it looks too different, we won't see them in space, though.
Our own intelligence is at the level where it's just barely sufficient to build a civilization when you got hands, fire, and so on. Note that orcas have much larger brains than humans, and had those larger brains for quite a long time, yet we're where we are, and they're where they are.
Likely because the first beings that could do that, did do that - no need to wait for the evolution of higher intelligence (so, in particular, this doesn't show that higher intelligence couldn't evolve).
Yeah, that's precisely my point. If there's more obstacles, intelligence has to go further before the technological civilization. We did get higher intelligence but only by other means (e.g. having paper and pencil helps, better nutrition gives higher IQ, and so on).
The Wikipedia article listing number of neurons in the cerebral cortex shows humans as significantly higher than whales, even though raw brain size may look better for whales. Wikipedia also describes an encephalization quotient which takes account of the fact that the brain is used for bodily functions, and on which whales don't score as highly as they may seem to from brain size.
Yeah, that's quite interesting. Raises the question though, why do they not have more neurons? They do have larger glia to neuron ratios, it's not like everything's simply bigger. Perhaps aquatic environment simply doesn't reward intelligence that much.
Well, the bodily functions are the same but occurring at a lower rate, for a larger mammal. Most of whale's body is fat, anyhow, which doesn't need to be controlled by brain, and it's not generally the case that people drop many IQ points when they become overweight. Nor are smaller people with same sized heads more intelligent.
edit: on the other hand, EQ may be a (very crude) measure of how well brain tissue pays off for an animal. If you have high quality brain tissue and you're in a complex environment, at the equilibrium between costs and benefits you would haul around more brain mass per body mass. With the obvious caveat that this tradeoff is very different between land animals, flying animals, and aquatic animals.
Women are in average approximately as intelligent as men (though it depends on how you weigh visual intelligence vs verbal intelligence, and anyway their variance is smaller) even though they have smaller heads.
But is it because of the smaller body sizes using less brain for the bodily functions? I don't think so.
edit: I frankly don't get the point with EQ. If we had to make a computer control for bodily functions (e.g. to grow ethical meat), we could do with a weaker cpu for larger animals because they work slower. It just doesn't make sense that body size would be using up brain to control it, irrespective of the composition of that body.