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 not have been achieved earlier, it is this hard part they are referring to (unless they're confused and don't understand this, in which case it this hard part they ought to be referring to).
It's a fair actual question, even if the answer is "they couldn't have," so "the hell" doesn't belong.
I think the question is rather on the rhetorical side (and I proceeded to give a sample of reasons for thinking so), so "the hell" is there to hint at the exasperation at a post that seems blithely naive.
You don't. You could assume it was infinitely old, and get other things right.
Let me augment that: really old and slowly changing. By the end of the 18th century, geologists knew that shark teeth found on mountain tops are likely explained by the fact that a long time ago, these rocks were under water. The idea that geological processes happen very slowly, in "deep time", and accumulate to produce huge changes was a direct inspiration to biologists in coming up with evolution.
The question is how something would have been possible, if it was possible. Your dismissal is too quick
Lukeprog's post didn't ask "how could they have discovered this through means other than with what modern science discovered it". Instead, it said "these discoveries follow from a few basic first principles and they could have just thought about them, but didn't". And my dismissal works by pointing out that this view is incredibly naive and ignorant of the massive amount of evidence that modern science needed to accumulate before these discoveries could be made.
Lukeprog's post didn't ask "how could they have discovered this through means other than with what modern science discovered it". Instead, it said "these discoveries follow from a few basic first principles and they could have just thought about them, but didn't"
We were both wrong; here's the relevant part:
...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 sele
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.
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