But more than that, you can't even talk about natural selection before you're convinced there's evolution.
Why not? After all, you had said "the hard part with natural selection is not figuring out that it happens. It's figuring out that it happens and it's responsible for a large portion of evolutionary diversity."
How the hell would ancient Greeks be able to get there just by sitting down and thinking "from first principles"?
It's a fair actual question, even if the answer is "they couldn't have," so "the hell" doesn't belong.
You need geology to tell you that Earth is really old.
You don't. You could assume it was infinitely old, and get other things right.
the Galapagos islands
The question is how something would have been possible, if it was possible. Your dismissal is too quick and seems based on showing how the Ancient Greeks couldn't have readily used the same evidence and thought that actually worked in recent history.
Why not? After all, you had said "the hard part with natural selection is not figuring out that it happens. It's figuring out that it happens and it's responsible for a large portion of evolutionary diversity."
What I meant to say (and thought it was clear from the context, but was possibly wrong) was that you can't talk about the important thing about natural selection - the "hard part" I'd mentioned earlier - without knowing about evolution. When people talk about natural selection as Darwin's great achievement that could or could n...
Also see: History of the Friendly AI concept.
The ancient atomists reasoned their way from first principles to materialism and atomic theory before Socrates began his life's work of making people look stupid in the marketplace of Athens. Why didn't they discover natural selection, too? After all, natural selection follows necessarily from heritability, variation, and selection, and the Greeks had plenty of evidence for all three pieces. Natural selection is obvious once you understand it, but it took us a long time to discover it.
I get the same vibe from intelligence explosion. The hypothesis wasn't stated clearly until 1965, but in hindsight it seems obvious. (Michael Vassar once told me that once he became a physicalist he said "Oh! Intelligence explosion!" Except of course he didn't know the term "intelligence explosion." And he was probably exaggerating.)
Intelligence explosion follows from physicalism and scientific progress and not much else. Since materialists had to believe that human intelligence resulted from the operation of mechanical systems located in the human body, they could have realized that scientists would eventually come to understand these systems so long as scientific progress continued. (Herophilos and Erasistratus were already mapping which nerves and veins did what back in the 4th century B.C.)
And once human intelligence is understood, it can be improved upon, and this improvement in intelligence can be used to improve intelligence even further. And the ancient Greeks certainly had good evidence that there was plenty of room above us when it came to intelligence.
The major hang-up for predicting intelligence explosion may have been the the inability to imagine that this intelligence-engineering could leave the limitations of the human skull and move to a speedier, more dependable and scalable substrate. And that's why Good's paper had to wait until the age of the computer.
</ speculation>