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Cikomyr
2016-04-13, 08:53 PM
So after binging too much Neil Degrasse Tyson, i started wondering exactly what were the conditions present in the specie just before the Australopithecus that allowed us to first start using tools, fire and language (the three most important elements to our evolutionary leaps).

I mean, some species on Earth use tools. That didnt made them intelligent like we actually understand it. What was present that allowed our ancestors to develop intelligence as a genuine advantage? The idea is to nail the conditions so that any other specie (perhaps alien, or Dinosaur) with the same characteristics could actually reach the state of tool users.

- First is probably the opposable thumb. Originally meant as a mean to easily grasp branches and climb. This, or at least something like it, is required for proper and delicate tool use.

- Omnivorous characteristics. Or at least, an early feeding from either environmental foods source (like plants) and mobile (animals). Meat-based nutrition is richer in protein and is essential in developing Predatorial hunting behavior. Whereas environment-based nutrition lead to observe and understand a specie's environment and analyze its effect, which could lead to early herbalism.

- While we were originally forest-dwellers (due to the opposable thumb) our early specie migrated to the plains, developping a bipedal method of locomotion. I think the one clear genetic advantage early humans had over all other specie really had a big influence there: efficient heat dissipation. Early humans could keep up with their prey for unnatural long period of time, until their preys would collapse of exhaustion. Early humans could track and trail preys for hours.

And this is, i believe, the key. Tracking without a super sense of smell required early humans to study their environment to figure out where their prey went so they could keep up. The members of that specie who were the most intelligent (best adapted at tracking) had a clear advantage over those who were dumber, more animalistic.

Our method of hunting and gathering led us to observe, understand. This, for the first time, meant that cognitive process was a clear evolutionary advantage over rivals. With better cognitive capacity came tools, fire, language. All of those snowballed into ever more cognitive capacity. Until we reached Homos Sapient.

Do you think there might be other means of developping human-grade intelligence? There are characteristics i speculated on who aren't as important as previously claimed?

Max™
2016-04-13, 09:04 PM
Methinks you should read uhhhh, Exultant (though it's actually book 2 of the Destiny's Children trilogy+1, the others being Coalescent, Transcendent, and Resplendent) since you enjoyed The Timeships, though Exultant is even crunchier sci-fi than it was. Manifold: Space (part of the Manifold: Time, Space, and Origin series) also goes over similar explorations, though it has easily the most soul-crushingly depressing revelation since Snape killed Trinity with Keyser Soze's sled.

Grinner
2016-04-13, 09:19 PM
Intelligence, you'll note, is sort of the ultimate adaptation. It's probably highly multifaceted.

The way I've heard it, intelligence developed as a means to function in rapidly changing environments. That is, if you're rapidly migrating to new areas, you need to be able to deal with a wide range of environments.

Regarding language, I think various animals are noted to have distinct languages. I think dolphins have an "international" language of sorts, used for communicating with dolphins outside their pod, and each pod also has an internal pod language.

Because I'm interested in AI, I often try to think of new ways to evolve intelligence. The problem with evolution is that it tends to solve problems elegantly, not generally. That is, it solves exactly the problem that's impeding survival and will tend to solve not one problem more. Thus, intelligence, a very general problem-solving ability, is so rare.

If nothing else, we could just take some mammal, say pigs, and try to do some kind of uplift procedure. Maybe find a mutation that enlarges the cerebral cortex?

BlueHerring
2016-04-13, 11:00 PM
So after binging too much Neil Degrasse Tyson, i started wondering exactly what were the conditions present in the specie just before the Australopithecus that allowed us to first start using tools, fire and language (the three most important elements to our evolutionary leaps). Fire isn't really a thing that comes into the picture until homo erectus, and maaaaaybe homo habilis, but the evidence for that is contentious at best.


I mean, some species on Earth use tools. That didnt made them intelligent like we actually understand it. What was present that allowed our ancestors to develop intelligence as a genuine advantage? The idea is to nail the conditions so that any other specie (perhaps alien, or Dinosaur) with the same characteristics could actually reach the state of tool users. Interestingly enough, the Paleolithic tool complexes correspond roughly with different taxa of homo species. The development from Oldowan to Acheulean tool complexes correspond roughly with the timeframes of H. habilis and H. erectus, and the same can be said for the Mousterian complex and the Neadertals. That being said, this advancement in technology is most likely tied to the increase in cranial capacity between each species.


- Omnivorous characteristics. Or at least, an early feeding from either environmental foods source (like plants) and mobile (animals). Meat-based nutrition is richer in protein and is essential in developing Predatorial hunting behavior. Whereas environment-based nutrition lead to observe and understand a specie's environment and analyze its effect, which could lead to early herbalism. This only really becomes a thing when megafauna die out at the end of the Pleistocene. The climate change also increases the amount of space that plants (grains, and so forth) could grow in, as they were primarily limited to higher elevations. Homo sapiens is basically forced to expand their diets to a varied amount of plants and animals in order to make up for the lack of megafauna.


- While we were originally forest-dwellers (due to the opposable thumb) our early specie migrated to the plains, developping a bipedal method of locomotion. I think the one clear genetic advantage early humans had over all other specie really had a big influence there: efficient heat dissipation. Early humans could keep up with their prey for unnatural long period of time, until their preys would collapse of exhaustion. Early humans could track and trail preys for hours.This is ridiculously important. The heat dissipation is a massive factor in allowing pre-humans to expand outwards from Africa.

Cikomyr
2016-04-14, 07:07 AM
All right. So tools and fire were more of a sign of intelligence than a cause. I was mistaken.

Regarding an argument mentionned previously: Capacity to adapt to the environment was probably also a sign of intelligence rather than the cause. Hence why we see the biggest migrations when early humans turned intelligent.

What i want to know is, what is the smoking gun? What set of circumstances led to intelligence being a clear, definitive competitive advantage? As opposed.. Claws, fangs, etc. that other predators have developped?

Still going back to the Heat Dissipation theory. Which i suppose would only be relevant in a warm blood environment. This in turn could mean that unless they massively turned warm-blooded, the Dinosaurs could not have developped intelligence on the same path.

So we need:


- Warm blood with efficient heat dissipation
- Meat-eating diet, based on extensive tracking hunting methods instead of violent ambushes
- Fine manipulation means

Am I missing something?

Tyndmyr
2016-04-14, 07:13 AM
What i want to know is, what is the smoking gun? What set of circumstances led to intelligence being a clear, definitive competitive advantage? As opposed.. Claws, fangs, etc. that other predators have developped?

As an adaptation, intelligence is expensive.

Most environmental obstacles can be overcome more easily by more specific changes, as we see among the animal kingdom. When faced with cold weather, most animals pick up insulation, etc, not the intelligence to start a fire.

What made THAT necessary was social competition. People seeking power, betraying each other, etc. We're social animals, and also, we're sometimes terrible to each other. Lots of fun studies in monkeys/apes/etc nowadays. They're getting smarter right now, for the same reason.

Cikomyr
2016-04-14, 07:25 AM
Except that we do not see other animals developping intelligence. Nor have we seen it in the million of years beforehand.

Standars competitions does not account for the development of intelligence. It might have helped it, just like it helped any other evolutionary process, but its not a cause.

Tyndmyr
2016-04-14, 08:32 AM
Except that we do not see other animals developping intelligence. Nor have we seen it in the million of years beforehand.

Standars competitions does not account for the development of intelligence. It might have helped it, just like it helped any other evolutionary process, but its not a cause.

Sure we do.

Dolphins are pretty intelligent, for instance. So are crows. As are dogs. There are packs of dogs that memorize train schedules and ride the trains, for instance.

However, summarizing social backstabbing, etc as "standard competition" is not sufficient. Sheep do not really engage in this. Neither do termites. Both of those are social, but they're not social in the right ways to get backstabbing, lies, etc. If you don't stumble into the right niche, you don't develop that kind of society. You need a social clustering of about the right size, with a certain degree of communication, a hierarchy, etc. All of the above examples, despite being fairly different from each other, have reasonably similar social models.

Kato
2016-04-14, 09:25 AM
Not to kill any discussion but there are huge amounts of people who have studied these things for decades now. And while they do have a bunch of assumptions what might be key factors in the development of human intelligence, I can't see a thread made up of (no offense) amateurs in the field coming up with things you can not get simpler and more reliable from a book on the subject...

This is like philosphers discussing relativity after they watched a popular science show about Einstein's life... you need proper in depth research, better a few years of studying the subject and discussion with other experts, not a friendly chat with other playgrounders to get a proper answer to this problem.

(Sorry, not intending to spoil anyone's fun)

Tyndmyr
2016-04-14, 09:30 AM
There's experts on every topic out there, for sure.

A casual forum chat scratches a different itch than a book does, for the most part.

Khedrac
2016-04-14, 11:18 AM
Oddly enough I think (personal theory) that fire may be more of a 'cause' than an 'effect'...

OK let's start with shrimp!
There's a species of shrimp that builds tunnels to live in. So what?, well in the book Science of Diskworld the authors tell of a 'pet' shrimp one of them had that, living in a tank with food supplied ended up filling half the tank with tunnels. Further they started giving it food in containers that it had to open to feed - and it got so good at this that it would often ignore food given not in a container.
So the point here is that lots and lots of species can display very complex or "intelligent" behavior if they have enough time to do so. Animals that spend all their waking time searching for food don't have the spare resources to get complex.

Now I completely agree that some animals have a higher basic level of intelligence than others - otters, dolphins etc., but both of those examples are species known for spending time in 'play' in the wild - and we can probably add crows to that list - they are known tool users and have a reputation of being animals prone to play around.

Inventing a tool to help gather food is only a viable strategy if one of two conditions hold:
1) the tool works first attempt
2) one has enough time that the time wasted on failed attempts doesn't lead to starvation.

This brings us back to fire. I have seen an article (in New Scientist I think) that suggested that cooked food is about 10 times as nutritious as uncooked (with the conversion of gristle etc. which are inedible, or nearly, when raw but edible when cooked).
Thus the discovery of cooking gave humans far more 'leisure' time in which to develop intelligence.
Now I hold that the pre-cooking hominids had to be pretty intelligent to learn about cooking (see earlier comments about dolphins and otters) but there's a good argument that it was the development of cooking that allowed our ancestors to really push on with developing an intelligence-based society rather than concentrating on food gathering.

Now I don't think this is "the full answer" - but I think it has to be one contributing factor.

Lorsa
2016-04-14, 11:27 AM
And this is, i believe, the key. Tracking without a super sense of smell required early humans to study their environment to figure out where their prey went so they could keep up. The members of that specie who were the most intelligent (best adapted at tracking) had a clear advantage over those who were dumber, more animalistic.

Interestingly enough, I've been lead to believe that it's the sense of smell that forced mammals (at this time living underground to avoid the Dinosaurs) to become intelligent.

Mostly because relying on a sense of smell requires memory to differentiate between good and bad, whereas visual/auditory does not (to the same extent).

Memory is really what predates intelligence, so you should really look for situations where it is much more beneficial to have it than not.

Tyndmyr
2016-04-14, 11:55 AM
Now I don't think this is "the full answer" - but I think it has to be one contributing factor.

Oh, sure. Any efficiency gain is going to allow you to perform better, and food is usually pretty central to survival. Likewise, developing agriculture made our food supply more stable and allowed a higher population density. Even things like modern agriculture and vaccinations were huge in allowing advancements. Getting wiped out occasionally by plagues is rough on development.

A group of chimps in the Congo are reported to have figured out fire, by the way. It'll be interesting to watch and see their path.

Douglas
2016-04-14, 12:15 PM
The two big factors I've heard of (as most definitely an amateur in this area) are:
Cooking with fire reducing the amount of effort required from the body to fully digest things, increasing the effective nutritional content of food and allowing higher viable energy budgets in the human body. Prior to this there just wasn't enough spare energy to run a really big brain.
Runaway self competition within the species in the form of competing for mates through social manipulation (and, possibly, intelligence itself becoming a desired trait in a mate).

That last point, intelligence becoming a common mate selection criterion, could easily be the most important factor, and a large part of that is just a fluke. Any trait that becomes a major mate selection criterion will get extremely exaggerated over many generations, that's how peacock tails developed. To some extent, we just got lucky that some of our ancestors chose intelligence as the trait to fixate on.

Cikomyr
2016-04-14, 12:15 PM
Not to kill any discussion but there are huge amounts of people who have studied these things for decades now. And while they do have a bunch of assumptions what might be key factors in the development of human intelligence, I can't see a thread made up of (no offense) amateurs in the field coming up with things you can not get simpler and more reliable from a book on the subject...

This is like philosphers discussing relativity after they watched a popular science show about Einstein's life... you need proper in depth research, better a few years of studying the subject and discussion with other experts, not a friendly chat with other playgrounders to get a proper answer to this problem.

(Sorry, not intending to spoil anyone's fun)

These very smart people have to properly research and prove their findings. Be reviewed and cited.

I have no such ambition. This is just a mind exercise for the less knowledgeable people. Like i said, it sparked from something said by someone that is allegedly very smart. Basically stating that there could have been a dinosaure Astrophysicist making the show in his stead, and it got me pondering:

Really? Could dinosaures have developped into intelligent life forms? (And please people, stop mentioning flippin' dolphins, or dogs, or whatever. When they will be able to understand polynomial mathematics, we will be talking).

So i started trying to think what actually lead to intelligence, as in problem-solving tool-makers. What set of circumstances allowed us to be the exception within millions of years of evolution. Because if intelligence was such a clear advantage, there should have been some already.

But no.


Interestingly enough, I've been lead to believe that it's the sense of smell that forced mammals (at this time living underground to avoid the Dinosaurs) to become intelligent.

Mostly because relying on a sense of smell requires memory to differentiate between good and bad, whereas visual/auditory does not (to the same extent).

Memory is really what predates intelligence, so you should really look for situations where it is much more beneficial to have it than not.

Fair enough. So i guess we needed the sense of smell (so dinosaurs did not smelled?!?), but not too much of it (like wolves), otherwise we could have relied on that and not on smart tracking.

Cikomyr
2016-04-14, 12:23 PM
The two big factors I've heard of (as most definitely an amateur in this area) are:
Cooking with fire reducing the amount of effort required from the body to fully digest things, increasing the effective nutritional content of food and allowing higher viable energy budgets in the human body. Prior to this there just wasn't enough spare energy to run a really big brain.

That's chicken and the egg. Fire and cooked food did indeed allow us to develop bigger brain, but we needed some degree of pretty advanced intelligence already to use it. Didnt we?


Runaway self competition within the species in the form of competing for mates through social manipulation (and, possibly, intelligence itself becoming a desired trait in a mate).

I just dont see it. Cooperation, more than competition, is the most defining trait of human evolution. We organized so much more efficiently and allowed a degree of coordination almost unseen.

Pure competition would have enhanced aggressivity, viviousness and physical capacity to fight. Not intelligence.

Compared to groups able to figure out abstract things, like herd movements, or just non-scent tracking. These groups would have starved a lot, lot less than other similar groups without the intelligence to figure these things. The more intelligent these early humans were, the more they could leverage their genetic advantage and catch running preys.

Until we started figuring tools, and then everything snowballed.

Phase
2016-04-14, 01:02 PM
Really? Could dinosaures have developped into intelligent life forms? (And please people, stop mentioning flippin' dolphins, or dogs, or whatever. When they will be able to understand polynomial mathematics, we will be talking).

They already did, in corvids and parrots.

The thing is that your definition of intelligence is not necessarily the only one. Polynomial mathematics are important when, for example, building a spaceship, but not so much when monitoring a food cache, for which regular arithmetic can suffice (and of which many bird taxa are capable.)

What managed to make humans intelligent is, like most of evolution by natural selection, a case of right place/right time. If a similar event occurred to corvids 8 million years ago (adjusted for their physiology of course) as occurred to humans 1-2 million years ago, we'd be living in a world populated by the ruins of corvid civilization.

Every organism on this planet has different means of receiving and processing feedback from their environments. Our methods are as advanced as they are as a necessary adaptation, and yet we're still nowhere near the most successful organism on Earth. We aren't special.

Tyndmyr
2016-04-14, 01:06 PM
Really? Could dinosaures have developped into intelligent life forms? (And please people, stop mentioning flippin' dolphins, or dogs, or whatever. When they will be able to understand polynomial mathematics, we will be talking).


Sure, dinosaurs maybe could have. Hard to tell for sure, but probably? Just too vulnerable to extinction events for it to actually work out, but if events had gone differently, hard to know.

As for math ability, yeah, that's a thing. A *lot* of animals can count at a basic level, and the more advanced ones(monkeys, etc) can demonstratably perform some calculations. They're not where we are, but stuff like addition, sure. Easy. Same for dolphins. Parrots, pigeons, sure.

Humans are the most advanced, but it's easy for us to get cocky, and realize that we're maybe not so superior as we'd like to believe.

georgie_leech
2016-04-14, 02:52 PM
Sure, dinosaurs maybe could have. Hard to tell for sure, but probably? Just too vulnerable to extinction events for it to actually work out, but if events had gone differently, hard to know.

As for math ability, yeah, that's a thing. A *lot* of animals can count at a basic level, and the more advanced ones(monkeys, etc) can demonstratably perform some calculations. They're not where we are, but stuff like addition, sure. Easy. Same for dolphins. Parrots, pigeons, sure.

Humans are the most advanced, but it's easy for us to get cocky, and realize that we're maybe not so superior as we'd like to believe.

Bacteria might not be able to understand the exponential growth they go through, but that runaway multiplication brings us to our knees often enough anyway. :smallamused:

cobaltstarfire
2016-04-14, 04:42 PM
Could you maybe define "intelligence".

Cause corvids and some species of cetacean have demonstrated to the ability to come up with novel solutions to things, and the ability to teach and learn these strategies. If you want to discount those animals as being intelligent, than what exactly do you mean by "intelligence"

Cikomyr
2016-04-14, 05:00 PM
Not sure. Pray tell me what is the difference between us and.. Dolphins, dogs, and all other animals you all seem hell bent on insisting are intelligent.

I understand that other species have relatively impressive cognitive function. Relatively. But its still trivial compared to mere Homos Erectus. Last time I checked, dolphins havent started any technological progress in their very long species span. Nor do they seem to progress toward higher intelligence.

wumpus
2016-04-14, 05:20 PM
Best theory I've heard is that human intelligence is a runaway sexual choice evolutionary structure. Basically, you need "more intelligence" to sweet talk a mate into reproducing with you (and then raising the young). It also comes in handy with get higher status (or at least fake it) and determining that higher status. One pretty good reason to believe this is by following the "politics" of chimpanzees. Detailed descriptions of the fall of the alpha male sounds like opera with the alpha simply holding the "idiot ball" far worse than you could possibly imagine. While a human might not thrive as well in the rest of the chimpanzee environment, the "politics" is something just about any human would excel at.

Most of this is detailed in The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. Full disclosure: this book explains human male mating strategies vs. female and female vs. male. It also deals with male vs. other males. It completely ignores females vs. other females. When this book came out (2003) I used to recommend this book a lot (mostly where smart woman biologists might notice), hoping that the book would sail across the room and a rebuttal would be published. Sadly, if that ever happened I haven't read it.

Tvtyrant
2016-04-14, 05:22 PM
Intelligence is probably most strongly linked to sexual cheating. All of the most intelligent animals (humans, crows, dolphins, octopi, cuttlefish, etc.) have either permanent or seasonal fixed partners and then cheat on them. Fixed partners are important because they make the burden of raising children easier, like making a nest, feeding a lactating animal, etc, and long childhoods are a large part of intelligence (except maybe in Octopi and Cuttlefish).

But fixed partnerships also show up in some pretty dumb animals (Penguins) and have massive drawbacks in that you cannot maximize the spread of your genetics, or pick out the better genes an unsuitable partner might have. So intelligent animals develop the ability to cheat, thus maximizing their genetics while minimizing their societal costs. Cheating requires complex planning though, and those who can cheat best have the most offspring while getting the most other individuals to pay for their rearing. As a result the smartest animals tend to cheat best, and make the species slowly get smarter.

That is how I was taught it anyway.

Phase
2016-04-14, 05:31 PM
Not sure. Pray tell me what is the difference between us and.. Dolphins, dogs, and all other animals you all seem hell bent on insisting are intelligent.

I understand that other species have relatively impressive cognitive function. Relatively. But its still trivial compared to mere Homos Erectus. Last time I checked, dolphins havent started any technological progress in their very long species span. Nor do they seem to progress toward higher intelligence.

As I see it, there really isn't any delineated difference between our intelligence and that of dolphins or apes or corvids or parrots, really.

The idea that an intelligence rooted in technology is the only worthwhile intelligence is highly anthropocentric. "Higher" intelligence is usually just defined as whatever intelligence humans possess, and the closer an intelligence is to human, the more "advanced," despite the fact that (prior to the point where humans began to overpopulate) our species has had on average about as much success as those with a "lower" intelligence.

In fact, in the long run, the period wherein humans appear to have a much greater degree of intellect (to the point where we massively outcompete our predators and prey) is a very very short one indeed, and for all we know is incredibly self-limiting to the point where a species assures its own downfall (in our case, climate change.)

It's telling that the most successful organisms are incapable of what we would define as "higher intelligence."

georgie_leech
2016-04-14, 05:34 PM
Not sure. Pray tell me what is the difference between us and.. Dolphins, dogs, and all other animals you all seem hell bent on insisting are intelligent.

I understand that other species have relatively impressive cognitive function. Relatively. But its still trivial compared to mere Homos Erectus. Last time I checked, dolphins havent started any technological progress in their very long species span. Nor do they seem to progress toward higher intelligence.

You realise the point they're making is that such animals aren't meaningfully different from us? In that we might have more intelligence, but that they are intelligent as well? :smallconfused:

cobaltstarfire
2016-04-14, 05:40 PM
Not sure. Pray tell me what is the difference between us and.. Dolphins, dogs, and all other animals you all seem hell bent on insisting are intelligent.

I understand that other species have relatively impressive cognitive function. Relatively. But its still trivial compared to mere Homos Erectus. Last time I checked, dolphins havent started any technological progress in their very long species span. Nor do they seem to progress toward higher intelligence.


I didn't include dogs for a reason. Sure they are smart but not particularly intelligent, if that makes any sense.

So far as I can tell there really isn't a huge difference between us and certain cetaceans or corvids, other than that we happen to be further along. The two groups have species with in them with language, culture, the ability make/use tools, and the ability to both teach and learn novel skill sets and tool use. (which is why I also didn't mention cephalopods, because they aren't especially capable of teaching/being taught even though they are very good problem solvers independently, I feel that the the inability to learn/teach combined with short life span is the main thing holding back the likes of the octopus when it comes to advancement)

I can't seriously expect to observe active progress towards higher intelligence in our life time,not even from humans. We are having all sorts of ever increasing progress towards knowledge, but that isn't the same thing as increase in intelligence.


Which is why I asked for you to define what you mean by intelligence. I know what my definition of intelligence is, but I'm asking after yours because it's a little hard to talk about what led to intelligence when we don't really know what boundaries we're working within.

Comissar
2016-04-14, 05:50 PM
Not sure. Pray tell me what is the difference between us and.. Dolphins, dogs, and all other animals you all seem hell bent on insisting are intelligent.

I understand that other species have relatively impressive cognitive function. Relatively. But its still trivial compared to mere Homos Erectus. Last time I checked, dolphins havent started any technological progress in their very long species span. Nor do they seem to progress toward higher intelligence.

Intelligence is an extremely broad term, as I'm sure you're noticing in this thread. It can refer to more or less any form of mental activity, ranging from purely academic to emotional. While intelligence itself is difficult to pin down, I would argue that anything with a centralised nervous system could be considered to be 'intelligent'. That is to say, anything with a brain can be considered to be intelligent. As with anything, there's a massive breadth in how emphasised that trait is. A Human is more intelligent than a Dolphin, is more intelligent than a Crow, is more intelligent than an Iguana, is more intelligent than a Wasp, is more intelligent than a Clam.

The evolution of intelligence is tricky to determine because the expression of intelligence is almost entirely behavioural, and that preserves very poorly in the fossil record. We can get tantalising glimpses from things like tool use in hominids, dinosaur trackways displaying hunting behaviours, preserved ant colonies displaying the complexities of social insect evolution. One of the best indicators is brain size to body size ratio. Mammals and Theropod dinosaurs (including Birds) typically have greatly enlarged brain cases compared to other animals of comparative sizes. Predators also tend to have an enlarged brain case. In modern animals, Mammals and Birds are the most intelligent organisms on Earth (a notable exception to this rule being Cephalopods, which have developed their own brand of intelligence independently of Vertebrates), with predators often being the most intelligent animals in a given ecosystem.

Now, what you appear to be referring to as 'intelligence' is probably better defined as sapience. This is a term that's even harder to define than intelligence and is defined by the all-knowing wikipedia as "the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight." Make of that definition what you will.

Another commonly used indicator of an animals intelligence is whether or not it's self-aware. That is, does it recognise that it is a "Me". There's only a small group of animals capable of this level of intelligence. Humans, obviously, are one of them. I believe all of the Great Apes are self-aware, which when you consider that primates are arguably the most intelligent group of mammals, makes a lot of sense. Elephants and Dolphins (possibly other cetaceans as well? I'd need to look that up) are also self-aware. Off the top of my head, I can't remember if there are any non-mammals that are self aware, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were some birds (particularly Corvids) that are. It's a very small group of animals that are capable of this level of cognisance. As has been mentioned up thread, intelligence is typically only selected up to a minimum point for survival purposes. This is the same across all traits, it's a waste of resources to overdevelop something, so evolution equips you with the bare minimum. Sexual selection, though, is a funny old thing. It leads to all sorts of ridiculously over-developed traits. In hominids, that just happened to be our intelligence. There's no reason why the same kind of sexual selection couldn't happen in another group, it just so happens that Dinosaurs preferred feathers to brains :smalltongue:.

Finally, as to your comment about Dolphins not starting any great technological endeavours, I'd like to quote the late, great Douglas Adams;


“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

Cikomyr
2016-04-14, 07:01 PM
You realise the point they're making is that such animals aren't meaningfully different from us? In that we might have more intelligence, but that they are intelligent as well? :smallconfused:

All right. Fair. If you people want, we can change the thread's topic to "advanced tool users", or " civilization-building".

Because there is only one specie in the world that, as far as we know, has the ability to communicate to other worlds and receive messages. There is only once specie who actually try to understand and explain the world around itself. And that is the sort of specie that is relevant to my OP.

You can have abstractly intelligence species if you want. I am talking about the sort of intelligence that eventually leads to space probes.

Phase
2016-04-14, 07:27 PM
Honestly? Happenstance. I have very little doubt that if you were to wipe out humanity right this moment (and let's say great apes too for good measure,) it would be only a matter of time before parrots or corvids or elephants or dolphins or what have you make the same sort of breakthroughs we did and achieve some sort of superficially similar intelligence.

NichG
2016-04-14, 07:55 PM
My guess would be that for all the highly intelligent animal species on this planet, there are certain timescales associated with the generation and decay of knowledge among that species' social groups. Crows can learn tool use, make tools for tasks, and learn from observing each other, so its possible to have knowledge in crow societies that lives longer than the individual crows. The same is true of chimp societies. The more an idea is learned, the more teachers there are, but its also possible that an idea fails to get passed on before the current holders of the idea die, and so on. The size of the social groups, how far they range, etc all impact these probabilities.

So it may be that even if all the physiological requirements for an advanced spacefaring society were to exist in crows (for example), the overall rate of knowledge self-amplification and the overall rate of knowledge decay in extant crow societies are such that any given bit of knowledge can statistically only survive for 50 years, or 100 years, or even 500 years. Maybe given 5 million years of statistical sampling, even crows would discover a piece of knowledge that itself improved the rate of retention of knowledge (or which was so important to survival that it biased their genetics to improve retention), and so they'd have a spontaneous transition to civilization. However, that's all irrelevant if they're living right next to a species whose timescale for transition to civilization is a mere 1000 years. Because once you have that transition to civilization, the accumulation of knowledge itself becomes faster exponentially with time.

So if that's the case, we shouldn't be too surprised to find lots of species that are indistinguishable from humans in terms of qualitative differences in their intelligence, but which are distinguishable in terms of quantitative differences and extent of utilization. Because 'our intelligence' isn't a property of individual humans so much as it's a social property of our civilizations.

The test would be to give prosthetic augmentations to knowledge transfer to e.g. chimp or crow societies, and then see if there's a critical retention rate which causes knowledge to begin to accumulate exponentially rather than remaining relatively constant with time.

veti
2016-04-14, 11:41 PM
Do you think there might be other means of developping human-grade intelligence? There are characteristics i speculated on who aren't as important as previously claimed?

Let me just mention a little thing called the Weak Anthropic Principle.

If we hadn't developed intelligence somehow, we wouldn't be sitting around discussing this question at all. We know that "our species" has already passed this test - so there's a massive selection bias in the sample (of 1) that we're considering. To assume that ours was the only possible way to develop this thing called "intelligence" seems quite unwarranted.

Comissar
2016-04-15, 03:45 AM
All right. Fair. If you people want, we can change the thread's topic to "advanced tool users", or " civilization-building".

Because there is only one specie in the world that, as far as we know, has the ability to communicate to other worlds and receive messages. There is only once specie who actually try to understand and explain the world around itself. And that is the sort of specie that is relevant to my OP.

You can have abstractly intelligence species if you want. I am talking about the sort of intelligence that eventually leads to space probes.

Again, as has been mentioned, humans have this inherent bias of thinking of themselves as being somehow 'special' in the world. In large part, that's because we have complex societies and accumulated knowledge that have allowed us to warp the landscape around us and reach a point where we can push beyond our biological limitations. And that is incredible, we're hairless bipedal apes that have managed to walk on the surface of another celestial body, and are actively probing the solar system (and beyond), as well as looking out into the stars.

However, this kind of technological and scientific advancement is not an inherent quality in humans. The capacity for it is there, certainly, or we wouldn't be making the advances in the first place, but an individual is incapable of learning everything there is to know in their own lifetime. There literally isn't enough time to read, let alone act on, every piece of scientific literature that's ever been produced, never mind things like Philosophy, or the Arts. Instead, these are societal constructs. The basis of this is language. Without language, we wouldn't be able to pass on knowledge and preserve it for future generations. Each generation would have to more or less start from scratch, with only whatever their forebears happened to remember to guide them. There's also a critical period in which it's imperative for language to be learned, otherwise the individual's mental growth will be severely stunted. If you want to read about that kind of thing, look for studies on 'Feral Children'. I will warn you that it's heartbreaking reading, but it does emphasise the importance of learning from a young age.

So language is important. The vast majority of animals have some way of communicating. It's often rudimentary, warning calls, mating calls, so on, so forth. But we also have some animals that are capable of more advanced communication. Dolphins, as have been repeatedly mentioned in this thread, do have their own language. You can communicate with Dolphins, and they've even been shown to be aware of the communication attempts as they will make their whistles slower and lower pitched for humans. They also have names for one another, unique whistle call signs attributed to specific individuals.

Dolphins also demonstrate learning behaviour. It's not unusual to hear stories of dolphins passing learned behaviours down through generations within a pod. There's one pod, for example, that will drive shoals of fish toward human fishers in shallow water, corralling them against the nets to the benefit of the pod and the humans. Another group use sponges to protect their beaks when sifting through sediments. Yet another hunt by having one pod member stir up mud in an arc in the path of a shoal while the pod pursue them from behind. The fish panic, leap from the water, and the Dolphins wait for them on the other side of the mud. These behaviours are passed through generations, and can arise relatively quickly. The idea that they could progress to a point comparable to Hominids is entirely possible. In fact, you could probably make a case for them already being as intelligent as some of the earlier Hominids.

Elephants also display this kind of advanced social intelligence. They mourn their dead, and have been shown to produce art. This includes things like self-portraits. There's a video online of a young Indian Elephant painting itself by a tree. Obviously the tools were provided by humans in this case, but the intelligence guiding the painting is entirely Elephant.

Khedrac
2016-04-15, 07:25 AM
All right. Fair. If you people want, we can change the thread's topic to "advanced tool users", or " civilization-building".
Well I think I gave a pretty good answer for that one - cooking. It gave us the time to develop advanced tool use and civilization.


Because there is only one specie in the world that, as far as we know, has the ability to communicate to other worlds and receive messages. There is only once specie who actually try to understand and explain the world around itself. And that is the sort of specie that is relevant to my OP.

You can have abstractly intelligence species if you want. I am talking about the sort of intelligence that eventually leads to space probes.
And that goes back very much to being a very, very narrow definition of intelligence. Also take out the word "eventually" and you get to exclude most of human history, put it back in and we have no way of knowing if the descendants of dolphins or otters or crows will become technological.

Long range communication gets interesting though. My first thought (before I saw you said other worlds) was whales with whalesong being a tool communicate across oceans.
As for a way of sending signals out, algae blooms are probably more visible than most things on earth, but we are unaware of any way for them to receive information back (and I would not call them intelligent). Then I remembered Star Trek 4 (oh well).

For that matter is sending signals to other worlds actually an intelligent action?
If our current understandings of physics are correct there is very little point - either no-one will receive the message or if they do there will be no real way to communicate. This makes such efforts a waste of resources that could be better spent elsewhere.
There is a small outlier of Von Neumann machines or similar lurking about the outer edges of the solar system (yes I am getting into science fiction here, but it better than FTL travel) in such a case advertising our presence might well be a bad idea from a species survival perspective.
Note: this is very different to space exploration which could provide a useful return.

BannedInSchool
2016-04-15, 08:06 AM
Elephants also display this kind of advanced social intelligence. They mourn their dead, and have been shown to produce art. This includes things like self-portraits. There's a video online of a young Indian Elephant painting itself by a tree. Obviously the tools were provided by humans in this case, but the intelligence guiding the painting is entirely Elephant.
Ah, unless there's more than one Painting Elephant, I believe that was debunked as just having being taught to paint the same painting by rote, to sell to tourists, not that the pattern it's reproducing means anything to the elephant.

Back to humans, did we mention the mutation that reduced the size of the jaw muscle on the side of our skulls, giving room for more brains? That seems a tricky transition there. We'd have to be smart enough with our food, using tools and/or fire, to not need the jaw strength. Or are we talking only pre-big brain here and then nevermind?

Comissar
2016-04-15, 08:37 AM
Ah, unless there's more than one Painting Elephant, I believe that was debunked as just having being taught to paint the same painting by rote, to sell to tourists, not that the pattern it's reproducing means anything to the elephant.

Ah, really? I stand corrected on that one then. They're smart animals nonetheless :smalltongue:


Back to humans, did we mention the mutation that reduced the size of the jaw muscle on the side of our skulls, giving room for more brains? That seems a tricky transition there. We'd have to be smart enough with our food, using tools and/or fire, to not need the jaw strength. Or are we talking only pre-big brain here and then nevermind?

Jaw size is much less of an issue when the jaw isn't your primary means of attacking. Very few primates have jaws of comparative strength to entirely quadrupedal predators, Baboons are the only ones that spring to mind. Humans went further than this, partly because we became true bipeds and could free up our arms to be used instead (and we do have quite significant upper body strength), but also because it'd be a waste of muscle and bone to have powerful jaws when you just chase down your prey to exhaustion instead. Enlarged braincases only really correlate with small jaw sizes when you look at unusual skull morphologies, which is something humans definitely fall into. Our jaws fail to form a snout, and the overall skull is just very very different to most other mammals. The musculature required for a powerful bite simply wouldn't work on a human skull without a major overhaul.

In contrast, Dolphins do have quite large jaws, and some groups pair that with a powerful bite. Orca's in particular are both intelligent, and strong biters.

wumpus
2016-04-15, 12:02 PM
You realise the point they're making is that such animals aren't meaningfully different from us? In that we might have more intelligence, but that they are intelligent as well? :smallconfused:

Good question. If an alien visited Earth 250,000 years ago, would they really expect homo sapiens to rise to dominate world ecology? Or would they have higher hopes for dolphins, ravens, parrots, chimps, etc? What little evidence there is indicates our intelligence has gone down since then (most domesticated animals lose intelligence as well).

Tvtyrant
2016-04-15, 04:15 PM
Good question. If an alien visited Earth 250,000 years ago, would they really expect homo sapiens to rise to dominate world ecology? Or would they have higher hopes for dolphins, ravens, parrots, chimps, etc? What little evidence there is indicates our intelligence has gone down since then (most domesticated animals lose intelligence as well).

Homo Erectus had stone tools and fires about three times further away in time, so yes, they probably would. I think you would have to go back as far as Homo Habilis to find stone tools primitive enough that you could compare other animal tools to them.

Donnadogsoth
2016-04-15, 05:50 PM
All talk of "anthropocentrism" begs the question of why aren't we all fruitarians with Jain brooms to sweep mites away from our treads. What are we really supposed to take away from a claim that we are "nothing special"? With a specific human chauvinism in mind, then, I'll say this on the possibility of non-homo-sapiens versions of intelligence evolving on Terra, or anywhere else.

The defining characteristic of man that separates him from the beasts is use of fire, most notably for the cooking of food. This characteristic reflects a monolith-in-the-mind, black, 1 X 4 X 9, that is full of stars. Thus, our destiny is to be a starfaring species, whether we are mapping the heavens, or guiding our ships by those maps, or building the engines to power those ships, or educating the minds that build those engines.

The only question of whether other, non-primate species can become such--can become men, as it were--is whether or not they can harness fire. Elephants, dogs can't, by fault of their lacking hands. Cetaceans are doubly-cursed both by lacking hands and being almost continuously immersed in a fire-retardant. Octopoids have the grasping ability but likewise suffer from immersion. The only possibility that comes to mind is avians, but the best of them are only half-formed when it comes to object-grasping, and the ones that can do even that are very small. Hard to start and manage fire with just a clawfoot and a beak.

EDIT: Raccoons.

NichG
2016-04-15, 10:26 PM
Well I think I gave a pretty good answer for that one - cooking. It gave us the time to develop advanced tool use and civilization.


And that goes back very much to being a very, very narrow definition of intelligence. Also take out the word "eventually" and you get to exclude most of human history, put it back in and we have no way of knowing if the descendants of dolphins or otters or crows will become technological.

Long range communication gets interesting though. My first thought (before I saw you said other worlds) was whales with whalesong being a tool communicate across oceans.
As for a way of sending signals out, algae blooms are probably more visible than most things on earth, but we are unaware of any way for them to receive information back (and I would not call them intelligent). Then I remembered Star Trek 4 (oh well).

For that matter is sending signals to other worlds actually an intelligent action?
If our current understandings of physics are correct there is very little point - either no-one will receive the message or if they do there will be no real way to communicate. This makes such efforts a waste of resources that could be better spent elsewhere.
There is a small outlier of Von Neumann machines or similar lurking about the outer edges of the solar system (yes I am getting into science fiction here, but it better than FTL travel) in such a case advertising our presence might well be a bad idea from a species survival perspective.
Note: this is very different to space exploration which could provide a useful return.

This conflates 'intelligence' with a particular kind of species-scale rationality (in that it assumes a particular objective function associated with the growth of the species). Sending signals into space may not help our species survive, but it definitely helps the guy who can then go and do a bunch of newspaper interviews saying 'I am the man who announced our species to the aliens' or the guy who says 'I learned how to build a radio transmitter robust enough to transmit signals to Pluto, so now I understand more about radio transmission in general and will go on to design smaller cellphones'. Even putting aside the broader category of rational action (that is, things which optimize some objective function), there's still all sorts of other kinds of cognitive abilities associated with information capture and transformation, artistic expression, creativity, learning, social interaction, etc.

If 'taking rational actions' is the measure of intelligence, E. coli already does that.

Cikomyr
2016-04-15, 11:02 PM
Jesus people. Can we stop with the *all animals are intelligent in their own ways* hippy crap? Its cute and all, but i am not here to discuss Special Snowflakes of Intelligence.

I am here to discuss the factors that lead to advanced tool users. Writing. Oraly transmitted lore. Complex hunting tactic. Domestication of animals. All the kind of things that led to civilization.

If you want to talk about how wonderfully intelligent a dolphin or a blowfish can become, create your own thread. In the meanwhile, they are disqualified because their environment prevents them to master fire, therefore they have no means of using thermal energy to predigest their food like we do through a process of cooking.

It all comes back to:

- means of manipulation
- environment available to produce fire

If it was that easy, why havent there been advanced dinosaure tool users to develop? The point of this thread was to determine a clear set of circumstances that, if artificially recreated in nature, would most likely lead to the evolution of a new tool-using specie.

Do you think the fact of being warmblooded was a factor? Or the fact that we live in a warmblooded environment? Because if it is, we could dismiss the possibility of dinosaurs developping their own sentient specie.

I mentionned our most efficient heat dissipating system. Which seems to me the smoking gun, because its the only thing we have a clear advantage over any other animals before we became more intelligent. Heat dissipation is only relevant for warmblooded animals, and its only relevant when hunting warmblooded preys.

I tried to speculate as to why "heat dissipation" would turn intelligence into such an advantage that our evolutionary path was set, which led to tool use and fire. Once we were on a path that established Intelligence as a competitive advantage, it was only a question of timr before we reached the next levels.

No other animal has made that leap, as far as we know, in the history of the earth.

I understand the argument that "just because its the path we took doesn't mean its the only potential path to reach enlightenment". And if you can point me to an alternative set of circumstances where intelligence becomes a clear and present advantage and still explain why it has not already occured in nature, i will be extremely interested. I know some proples have already provided extremely insightful comments.

I am just tired of the conversation being distracted about another meaningless conversation denouncing the hubris of mankind considering itself the sole intelligent specie on Earth. Not the point.

Jallorn
2016-04-15, 11:07 PM
It's worth considering that there isn't so much a smoking gun as there is a steady change over long periods of time. A number of complex factors: access to enough food to keep those with more complex brains at their peak, increasingly complex social structures as two prominent abilities, the ability to manipulate others (and, as a subset, the ability to identify manipulation) and the ability to coordinate/organize/negotiate/lead others better became selected for. Groups, or tribes, come into conflict, and while the stronger ones might win, they might be stronger because they were better able to coordinate their food-finding efforts, but the weaker ones might also win because they are clever enough to know a confrontation is coming and set up an ambush.

Intellect can be selected for in indirectly competitive ways as well: the aforementioned manipulation can result in the manipulator being better fed, getting a safer sleeping spot, being watched out for, and statistically, such advantages mean that the better manipulators survive just a little longer, and get slightly better mates, and have slightly more children, than a less capable manipulator, all else being equal.

I also think that you shouldn't necessarily write off other animals that can't reach our level, because you can still sort of cross examine between them and us, see what pressures we share in common that could have produced the better brain. It's also worth considering that some animals might yet adapt past the limitations you see in them now. Octopodes could possibly move to the land, if there's enough success in those who can briefly such that they eventually can permanently. Racoons or birds could grow larger, though do think that they would need to find a solution to the problem of their legs also being their graspers, in the case of birds. There's only so much fine manipulation you can manage with one hand while balancing on one foot.

I think that minimally, an advanced tool maker is going to need: symmetry of shape (it is genetically efficient, this is more of a general inclination of lifeforms, though some manage something similar, but not quite symmetrical, such as leaf growth patterns), minimum two legs, minimum two manipulators/hands. I also think that the efficiency of a minimalist structure will be selected for, because if you've got to get enough food to feed four legs, but your competition on needs enough food for two, the competition is likely to fare better. Admittedly, there's counter arguments for this last one among arthropods and invertebrates. Arthropods have not evolved sufficiently good lungs to support a large enough brain for intellect, and I am uncertain if they can. In short, I expect any vertebrate intellect to be vaguely humanoid, and any non-humanoid to likely be invertebrate.

NichG
2016-04-15, 11:26 PM
There's also something called the Baldwin effect that is relevant here. If you have organisms that have within-lifetime learning, it causes the genetic space to become effectively more neutral, because the within-lifetime learning can compensate for factors in the genetic space which would otherwise have strong epistasis (that is to say, they would otherwise need to mutate in tandem in order to not create a harmful mutation). For example, if you have a static neural net for controlling a limb, and a genetic circuit that determines the layout of sensors and muscles and such in that limb, then those two things must co-evolve quite tightly for the limb to retain its function. If you change the length without changing the neural net, then the controller will make all sorts of mistakes, even if a longer limb would be advantageous given the right neural controller.

So if an organism can adapt itself to its circumstances, body plan, etc during its own lifetime, it in turn becomes much easier for the genetic layer to explore variations of those features.

Basically, the question isn't 'why would intelligence be advantageous enough to be selected for?' (it always is), and it isn't 'what kinds of special physiological features were necessary for intelligence to advance far enough for human-scale intelligence?' (because that appears to be a dead end when we go looking for them via comparative studies with animals), but rather 'what kinds of knowledge would so strongly entrain cognition that they caused cognition to specialize towards transferring existing knowledge rather than generating it?'.

That seems to be the qualitative dynamical difference between 'civilization' and 'a bunch of smart individuals'. At some point, the mechanism for adapting to individual variations in genes, body, situation, and environment became co-opted into an information transfer system instead. This actually pushes against the main benefits - if I receive imparted wisdom, that imparted wisdom hasn't been customized to my circumstances, so its actually less adaptive than me rediscovering everything for myself. So that seems to me to be where the interesting tension exists.

Comissar
2016-04-16, 04:01 AM
Jesus people. Can we stop with the *all animals are intelligent in their own ways* hippy crap? Its cute and all, but i am not here to discuss Special Snowflakes of Intelligence.

I am here to discuss the factors that lead to advanced tool users. Writing. Oraly transmitted lore. Complex hunting tactic. Domestication of animals. All the kind of things that led to civilization.

If you're wanting to discuss factors that lead to advanced tool use, orally transmitted lore, complex hunting strategies, and domestication of animals, then you can't disentangle that from discussing animal intelligence. The two are intimately linked to the point that they may as well be the same thing. To address the points you mention, Dolphins, Corvids and Great Apes all make good use of tools to achieve what would be impossible if they only relied upon their natural biology. Dolphins and Apes are also capable of passing on knowledge across generations to generate behaviours that are not seen across species but are instead localised to pods/troops. Complex hunting strategies is a wooly term, I have to ask where you draw the line on that one. There are whales that work as a team to hunt. Two of them corral shoals of herrings using bubble 'nets', circling the shoal to keep them in one place. A third swims beneath them and emits a powerful sound to drive them to the surface. Then the whole pod can feed together. The whales that do this aren't related to one another, which means that they're co-operating beyond the interests of family survival (video here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8iDcLTD9wQ) if you're interested, it's pretty cool). For domestication of animals, even in Hominids that arrived quite late. A large portion of our evolutionary history was as Hunter-Gatherer's. Settling down and domesticating animals wasn't really a thing for a long time. Also, it may not be as great an indicator of intelligence as you might think. Some ant colonies domesticate aphids, 'milking' them to provide themselves with another food source. While ants are Eusocial insects, and are therefore more intelligent than most other arthropods, I wouldn't place them on the same level as vertebrates for their level of intelligence.


If you want to talk about how wonderfully intelligent a dolphin or a blowfish can become, create your own thread. In the meanwhile, they are disqualified because their environment prevents them to master fire, therefore they have no means of using thermal energy to predigest their food like we do through a process of cooking.

I don't think anyone mentioned blowfish :smalltongue:

Also, I've seen a couple of people claim that fire is a pre-requisite for human level intelligence now. I'm not convinced that's actually true, though I'll admit that intelligence studies are just something that hold a passing interest for me, they aren't my area of expertise.


It all comes back to:

- means of manipulation
- environment available to produce fire

A mouth can be used to manipulate objects. It's sufficient for Dolphins to make use of tools (I know I keep bringing them up, but they are relevant to any discussion on animal intelligence). Birds too, they use their beaks to manipulate tools.


If it was that easy, why havent there been advanced dinosaure tool users to develop? The point of this thread was to determine a clear set of circumstances that, if artificially recreated in nature, would most likely lead to the evolution of a new tool-using specie.

I think the point is that it isn't easy. It's a trait that needs to be selected for, and the conditions that lead to it being selected for are remarkably specific. There needs to be a good reason why intelligence is chosen ahead of being faster, or bigger, or smaller. To evolve a trait, it must give a benefit (aiding in passing genes to the next generation in some way, be it through having a greater chance of survival, or a greater chance of being chosen as a sexual partner) greater than its cost (either a literal material cost, such as requiring additional minerals to form larger teeth, or an active hinderance to an animals ability to survive, such as a male Peacock's absurdly long train of feathers).

If a cost is minimal, then a trait with barely any benefit can evolve, though there is often a very minor selection pressure for such a trait. I'm trying to think of an example to give, but in the evolutionary arms race even things like the pitch of an animals voice can play a role in survival, so it's hard to think of something that gives an extremely minimal benefit.

If a cost is low, and the benefit is high, then you can expect a trait to evolve even if there is fairly low selection pressure for it. The cost of skin/fur/scale colouration is low, but it can be of immense benefit to an animal through camouflage or signalling. Camouflage is very common across environments and species.

If a cost is high, but the benefit is low, chances are the trait won't evolve and a different means of adaptation will arise instead. The important thing to remember with evolution is that each step needs to improve the chance of the animals genes being passed to the next generation. Animals don't evolve traits that do nothing to help them so that they can adapt them into something else generations down the line. Instead, the incremental changes leading to a 'final' adaptation must be beneficial in some way. If the initial cost of a trait is too high to justify having it, then you won't see it proliferate through a species. It's difficult to think of a specific example for this because, by its nature, this kind of trait just isn't seen very often.

Finally, if a cost is high, but the benefit is also high, then the selection pressures will need to be right for the trait to emerge. Intelligence is a good example of this final kind of trait. The benefits of being intelligent are tangible. It enables more advanced hunting strategies, better recognition of predators, faster reaction times, the ability to remember where the one watering hole for miles around is, so on, so forth. However, running a complex brain is very energy intensive. The human brain, for example, uses a staggering 20% of the total energy that's consumed. That's way out of proportion for the rest of the body, and is actually higher (up to 33% if memory serves) in young children. For such a huge investment, the reward needs to be worthwhile. In many environments, it's simply less expensive to be faster, or to have better eyesight. Sure, it means you won't develop into a sapient, global force, but as I said, Evolution doesn't work to an end goal, it just equips a species to survive. I mentioned in a previous post about the list of self-aware animals. Such a list is extremely short, Humans, Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Gorillas, Orang-utans, Elephants, and Dolphins (and possibly Corvids, still haven't checked that one) form the entire list. Compare that to the staggering number of species alive on Earth today. It's telling that high intelligence (which I will define from now on as being self-aware) is present only in these 7/8 groups. Additionally, high intelligence has only evolved 3/4 times, as 5 of the 7/8 groups are all Great Apes. It's reasonable to assume the common ancestor of the Great Apes also had high intelligence, and it then was further developed to varying degrees by the subsequent lineages.


Do you think the fact of being warmblooded was a factor? Or the fact that we live in a warmblooded environment? Because if it is, we could dismiss the possibility of dinosaurs developping their own sentient specie.

Dinosaurs, even non-Avian dinosaurs, were warmblooded.


I mentionned our most efficient heat dissipating system. Which seems to me the smoking gun, because its the only thing we have a clear advantage over any other animals before we became more intelligent. Heat dissipation is only relevant for warmblooded animals, and its only relevant when hunting warmblooded preys.

Why heat dissipation? Elephants also dissipate heat efficiently, Sauropods dissipated heat efficiently. If you're meaning the adaptations that make us excellent endurance runners, bear in mind that heat dissipation is far from the only adaptation for that.

Hominids were more intelligent than anything else in their environment during their evolution. Primate intelligence developed within dense forests, were you need to have excellent hand-eye co-ordination, be aware of your surroundings in a 3D environment, and generally watch for predators that could come from anywhere. Taking that and moving to an essentially 2D environment, with a much greater field of view, could have allowed some of that processing power to be diverted to other activities. I will say this bit is entirely speculative on my part, don't take it as gospel. It's just a thought :smallsmile:


I tried to speculate as to why "heat dissipation" would turn intelligence into such an advantage that our evolutionary path was set, which led to tool use and fire. Once we were on a path that established Intelligence as a competitive advantage, it was only a question of timr before we reached the next levels.

Careful about defining intelligence levels. It's very much a spectrum, you can't really pick a point on it and say 'This is level 5 intelligence', because then you need to explain why the point just before it isn't.


No other animal has made that leap, as far as we know, in the history of the earth.

Correct. I've heard arguments before that having a globally dominating high intelligence species directly limits the appearance of others of the same calibre. It's an impossible hypothesis to test since we have a sample of one, and we have all sorts of biases as to what does and doesn't constitute intelligence, but it's an interesting look at it nonetheless.


I understand the argument that "just because its the path we took doesn't mean its the only potential path to reach enlightenment". And if you can point me to an alternative set of circumstances where intelligence becomes a clear and present advantage and still explain why it has not already occured in nature, i will be extremely interested. I know some proples have already provided extremely insightful comments.

Hopefully you'll find the above content interesting then :smallsmile:


I am just tired of the conversation being distracted about another meaningless conversation denouncing the hubris of mankind considering itself the sole intelligent specie on Earth. Not the point.

Well... It's not so much the hubris of considering ourselves the most intelligent, because we are. It's more the fact that such an argument is often followed by the statement that we are somehow apart from nature as a result, claiming that Humanity is some kind of unique and irreplicable result. You've not really tried to push that angle, which in my view is great. I think it's cool that humans are just another animal, personally, and I see it as a great shame that people want to try and distance us as a species from the rest of the animal kingdom.


There's also something called the Baldwin effect that is relevant here. If you have organisms that have within-lifetime learning, it causes the genetic space to become effectively more neutral, because the within-lifetime learning can compensate for factors in the genetic space which would otherwise have strong epistasis (that is to say, they would otherwise need to mutate in tandem in order to not create a harmful mutation). For example, if you have a static neural net for controlling a limb, and a genetic circuit that determines the layout of sensors and muscles and such in that limb, then those two things must co-evolve quite tightly for the limb to retain its function. If you change the length without changing the neural net, then the controller will make all sorts of mistakes, even if a longer limb would be advantageous given the right neural controller.

So if an organism can adapt itself to its circumstances, body plan, etc during its own lifetime, it in turn becomes much easier for the genetic layer to explore variations of those features.

Basically, the question isn't 'why would intelligence be advantageous enough to be selected for?' (it always is), and it isn't 'what kinds of special physiological features were necessary for intelligence to advance far enough for human-scale intelligence?' (because that appears to be a dead end when we go looking for them via comparative studies with animals), but rather 'what kinds of knowledge would so strongly entrain cognition that they caused cognition to specialize towards transferring existing knowledge rather than generating it?'.

That seems to be the qualitative dynamical difference between 'civilization' and 'a bunch of smart individuals'. At some point, the mechanism for adapting to individual variations in genes, body, situation, and environment became co-opted into an information transfer system instead. This actually pushes against the main benefits - if I receive imparted wisdom, that imparted wisdom hasn't been customized to my circumstances, so its actually less adaptive than me rediscovering everything for myself. So that seems to me to be where the interesting tension exists.

As I discussed further up in this post, intelligence may offer tangible benefits, but the costs are also high. To select for it, it needs to be the best available option, and it often isn't. If it were, we'd expect to see significantly more high intelligence species around.

veti
2016-04-16, 04:08 AM
I am here to discuss the factors that lead to advanced tool users. Writing. Oraly transmitted lore. Complex hunting tactic. Domestication of animals. All the kind of things that led to civilization.

Interesting choices. What's an "advanced tool"? Because several animals, from apes to birds, have been observed to use primitive tools, as advanced as those used by humans of, say, 30,000 years ago. What's "orally transmitted lore"? Because dolphins have their own languages and dialects. What's "complex hunting tactics"? Watch a few documentaries about killer whales, or dolphins, or even humpback whales. As for "domestication of animals"? - heck, ants do that.


It all comes back to:

- means of manipulation
- environment available to produce fire

OK, so you're not talking about "intelligence" at all, then. You're talking about fire.


If it was that easy, why havent there been advanced dinosaure tool users to develop?

Good question. I don't know the answer, but my guess would be that it has to do with socialisation. I think there is a critical threshold of population density, which necessitates sophisticated communication - in a word, politics - in order for people to live together and co-operate on a large and persistent scale. I don't think any single dinosaur species ever came anywhere near that threshold.


Do you think the fact of being warmblooded was a factor? Or the fact that we live in a warmblooded environment? Because if it is, we could dismiss the possibility of dinosaurs developping their own sentient specie.

Okay, there are at least three things wrong with that assertion.

One: yes, being warmblooded is definitely "a factor". If we weren't warmblooded, our development would have worked quite differently, and who knows how it would have worked out? That's a possible counterfactual for some SF author somewhere, although personally I don't really care enough to speculate. BUT: merely because development would have been different, doesn't mean our intelligence or technological achievements would have been any less. Maybe the coldblooded version of humans could have colonised their entire solar system by now.

Two: the jury is out, and will likely remain so, but there's every possibility that at least some species of dinosaur were warmblooded.

And three: there you go again with "sentient", which is a dimly defined concept at the best of times. If you don't want us to become distracted by talking about animal intelligence, then I suggest you stop using words like "intelligent" and "sentient", and stick to "civilisation" and "fire", which you seem to be saying is the key element you're really interested in.

Comissar
2016-04-16, 04:10 AM
Two: the jury is out, and will likely remain so, but there's every possibility that at least some species of dinosaur were warmblooded.

Not out, they're warm-blooded. Plenty of evidence pointing to warm-bloodedness in both Saurischian and Ornithischian dinosaurs :smalltongue:

NichG
2016-04-16, 05:07 AM
As I discussed further up in this post, intelligence may offer tangible benefits, but the costs are also high. To select for it, it needs to be the best available option, and it often isn't. If it were, we'd expect to see significantly more high intelligence species around.

As you yourself pointed out, intelligence is a spectrum rather than a set of discrete levels, so its actually kind of hard to say how thoroughly we've surveyed and characterized the intelligence of all known species. There are a growing set of markers we're learning about which are starting to gel into more category-ish things, but there's a lot of very slow work to be done.

Also, the costs of intelligence are pretty fluid, and the relationship between degree of intelligence and cost is really inconsistent. For example, you can do operant conditioning in Drosophila, and the entirety of the mechanism enabling that is something like 22 neurons in size. When it comes to human brains, we're genetically willing to pay the cost for multiple redundancies, including systems that have an order of magnitude more neurons to do the same task but are slightly faster in response times and things like that. So I don't think the direct cost of intelligence is so important to its development.

cobaltstarfire
2016-04-16, 12:49 PM
Jesus people. Can we stop with the *all animals are intelligent in their own ways* hippy crap? Its cute and all, but i am not here to discuss Special Snowflakes of Intelligence.



Yeah, so instead of being super condescending all the time, how about you actually define what you mean by intelligence that actually excludes the animals people keep bringing up.

Most people are not talking about "animals [being] intelligent in their own [special] ways" they're talking about animals that use tools, have culture, have a language, learn and teach information, and come up with novel solutions to problems which are often "complex hunting strategies"

"I disqualify these animals because they don't match my definition of intelligence, and also I'm not going to tell you what my definition of intelligence really is and why it disqualifies these particular animals" is not productive or helpful to your discussion.

Yuki Akuma
2016-04-16, 05:31 PM
And three: there you go again with "sentient", which is a dimly defined concept at the best of times.

Nah. Sentience is pretty easily understood. It's also something almost all animals possess, and several species of other kingdoms altogether. It's just the ability to sense your environment and tell yourself apart from it.

Sapience is the hard-to-define one, because it can't be experimentally tested. I can't even prove you're sapient! I just have to take it on faith.

Donnadogsoth
2016-04-16, 07:10 PM
Nah. Sentience is pretty easily understood. It's also something almost all animals possess, and several species of other kingdoms altogether. It's just the ability to sense your environment and tell yourself apart from it.

Sapience is the hard-to-define one, because it can't be experimentally tested. I can't even prove you're sapient! I just have to take it on faith.

You must have some test, or else you'd be ascribing sapience to rocks.

Douglas
2016-04-16, 07:50 PM
Sapience is the hard-to-define one, because it can't be experimentally tested. I can't even prove you're sapient! I just have to take it on faith.
Reminds me of the Star Trek episode where Data's sentience was called into question and Picard had to defend it in court. Picard had a great line near the end, "prove to the court that I am sentient."

Apparently they might have been using the wrong word for most of all of the episode, but it's an interesting question.

Yuki Akuma
2016-04-16, 07:59 PM
You must have some test, or else you'd be ascribing sapience to rocks.

Well... no, not really?

There are some things you really just can't prove and need to take on faith. You just kind of... assume that, because you are sapient, then other things like you must also be sapient. So humans are probably sapient! But rocks? The most distinct property you have in common with a rock is being composed partially of oxygen. It's so very unlike your known sample for sapience that you can just dismiss the possibility of it being sapient out of hand.

You can't really describe that as a test, but it's the only way we know how to classify things as "sapient" versus "non-sapient".

Where it actually gets fuzzy is when you think of other animals like chimpanzees or dolphins. Are they sapient? They have a lot in common with humans, like complex social structures, in-life learning, different cultures based on genetic and geographic differences, and the ability to project what appears to be empathy onto other animals. But we can't actually ask them if they're sapient, so we can't really ever know for sure.

NichG
2016-04-16, 08:48 PM
You must have some test, or else you'd be ascribing sapience to rocks.

Some do. It's called panpsychism.

The creation of the illusion of sapience in ostensibly non-sapient things is a sort of art form as well. How to make e.g. a robot or CG model move and react in ways that will convince an audience to see it as a person rather than a robot or CG model.

wumpus
2016-04-18, 01:34 PM
Some do. It's called panpsychism.

The creation of the illusion of sapience in ostensibly non-sapient things is a sort of art form as well. How to make e.g. a robot or CG model move and react in ways that will convince an audience to see it as a person rather than a robot or CG model.

Somehow I suspect this can be refuted by creating a "panpsychism" edition of the Turing test. Compare all programs to those that can successfully imitate a rock, and use them as a measure of "sapience". In other news, the listening Monks of the discworld claim to have discovered two simultaneous "Ow!" sounds emitted shortly after Johnson's refutation of Bishop Berkeley.

Frozen_Feet
2016-04-18, 03:33 PM
The conditions which lead to individual intelligence in humans probably aren't the same as those which lead to complex technological society.

To understand this point, look at communal insects such as ants. An individual ant has much less general intelligence than an individual human, but as species ants surpassed human abilities in construction and agriculture for quite a long time and are still among the most succesfull species on Earth.

I think this can be attributed to numbers.

More specifically, I think NichG is most correct in emphasizing information retention and transfer, but in order for these to allow for a rising curve of technological progress, you need sufficient information density, which in turn requires sufficient population density.

But humans, at their most natural, are hunter-gatherers. We apparently have evolved to function in fairly small (~200 people at most) foraging communities. Our natural lifestyle was highly mobile and didn't favor dense groupings. Because of this, while I think humans have been indivually very intelligent for a long time, I do not believe this was the key to technological society.

Communal stupidity was. Specifically, agriculture.

Agriculture is one of those things that's been drummed up as reason for human supremacy for a long time, but ironically, contemporary research suggests sedentary lifestyle was in many ways a step down in general health and well-being of humans. It allowed for denser populations, but with it also came disease epidemics and malnutrition.

So I think the key is finding out which conditions ~10 000 ago allowed for agriculture to persist long enough for increased population density to lead to increased information density and create a positive feedback loop allowing for agricultural societies to outcompete hunter-gathering.

Avilan the Grey
2016-04-18, 11:49 PM
Not sure if this is said already in this thread but I did read in several places that even though humans are unique, evolution seems to favor big brains, slowly.
Even if you disregard things like the earth being ruled by giant insects for a long time, and the relative smallness of dinosaur brains compared to body size... Evolution have really pushed it lately.

Apparently the brains have doubled, roughly, among comparable species. Today's big cats, for example, have roughly twice the brain mass as sabre toothed tigers. It's not a clear cut line, of course; moden-ish lions did co-exist with sabers for a while, AFAIR, and so did modern wolves and dire-wolves.

Edit: As for elehpants: It is worth noting that their trunks are at least as good at manipulating things as our hands. Might contribute to intelligence, as pointed out. Of course that's just to a limited extent or racoons would be as smart as us...
But yes, elephants are fascinating; not only do they mourn their dead, as in recently dead they can see; they are one of the very few species confirmed to recognize skeletons of their own species, and do, when they find them, fondle them and seem to exchange large amount of sounds between each other.

Lorsa
2016-04-21, 10:12 AM
Fair enough. So i guess we needed the sense of smell (so dinosaurs did not smelled?!?), but not too much of it (like wolves), otherwise we could have relied on that and not on smart tracking.

As far as I know, dinosaurs did not rely on smell to the same extent as the below-ground living mammals at the time. I've been told that it was the key factor to develop memory, and that once mammals did not need to rely on smell alone, they could high-jack these cognitive memory functions to work on other senses as well. However, if there hadn't been a need for over-reliance on smell, it's not as certain that memory (and thus intelligence) would have developed. The dinosaurs certainly managed quite well with their small brains after all.

I'm not sure "smart tracking" is the thing really. Once you have memory, the ability to manifest it for other senses isn't far behind. I mean, most of the species mentioned in this thread that have "intelligence" are basically those that have good memory. Dogs, for example, have excellent memory, and can remember a person by scent several years after they've encountered them. They also remember visual & auditory commands, along with behavior modifications requested for them.

Fish on the other hand, generally have rather poor memory, which is why it is very hard to train them.

I think breaking down the cognitive functions that is contained in "intelligence" in this way is the most useful approach, because it would help you figure out what situations or selection criteria that might spur development of those functions.

So, while memory is the first (and I do believe humans excel at memory at large), there are other functions that enter into "intelligence". Language, for example, is one. While all species react to external stimuli in some way, I don't think we can ascribe "language" to bacteria. I don't believe in making Aristotelian definitions, but let us assume language has to do with the ability to communicate X and have it trigger action (or understanding) Y in another individual. Clearly, just about all mammals do this to some extent, as to do many other species and types of animals. Everything from birds to fish communicate. Overall, language will probably happen by default for any evolutionary path which requires mating and/or flock activity. So what you want to look at are things that spur better language capabilities.

It is hard to tell exactly why we humans are so extremely good at language. The capability of being able to produce a large variety of X's certainly would enter into it. Sound is particularly good, as you can easily change the frequency or amplitude and link that various X. Another way would be if you can emit light at specific frequencies and use that for X, or change your smell. Basically, the larger ability to modify the medium used for communication, the more language can develop. Of course, language then leads into abstract thought and using symbols to represent ideas etc etc.

Then we have the ability for prediction. While there are animals that use tools, it is possible to spot the time in human development when we started to save tools for the future, or pick up something because it might be useful in the future even though it wasn't right now. This is one of the major ways in which we are set apart from pretty much all other animals, although not nearly as good as we ought to be. The ability to adapt behavior today for likely changes in the environment tomorrow is, I think at least, extremely important for intelligence and its development. In order for that to be strongly selected, the environment needs to be changing. If it is static, and the same action will generate food every day, there is no need to ever change it or adapt. Of course, the environment needs to be predictable, as if it's chaotic, there is no need to try and predict it.

I am sure if you google on cognitive function evolution, you can find some more parts of intelligence, but in general I think that's what we are built up by. We have very good memory, very high brain plasticity, a good capability for language and the ability for planning. We differ from all other animals in a scale factor which is so large that this "other animals are intelligent too!" nonsense is ignoring that we are not only able to adapt to our environment, we can change it to adapt to us.

Language, memory and predictive ability gives us Collective Learning, which is the key to technological growth and civilization at large.

In a sense, it is wrong to think in terms of "what made humans develop intelligence", as we follow an evolutionary path of intelligence growth that leads right back to the formation of the first RNA molecule. It is quite obvious that intelligence can also develop in other animals on Earth. We just happened to be on the "fast-track" so to speak. But if you want to look at situations that might provide this track, look for those where memory is required for survival, better language useful (social structures / mating necessary), and predictive ability almost essential. I think that's your recipe for intelligence.

thorgrim29
2016-04-21, 12:32 PM
But humans, at their most natural, are hunter-gatherers. We apparently have evolved to function in fairly small (~200 people at most) foraging communities. Our natural lifestyle was highly mobile and didn't favor dense groupings. Because of this, while I think humans have been indivually very intelligent for a long time, I do not believe this was the key to technological society.

Communal stupidity was. Specifically, agriculture.

Agriculture is one of those things that's been drummed up as reason for human supremacy for a long time, but ironically, contemporary research suggests sedentary lifestyle was in many ways a step down in general health and well-being of humans. It allowed for denser populations, but with it also came disease epidemics and malnutrition.

So I think the key is finding out which conditions ~10 000 ago allowed for agriculture to persist long enough for increased population density to lead to increased information density and create a positive feedback loop allowing for agricultural societies to outcompete hunter-gathering.

I don't know how credible it is but I keep hearing that agriculture in the fertile crescent was probably influenced by wanting to get beer. If you're in an area where wheat and other grains just grow naturally it's fairly easy to intuit how the growing process works, and to figure out that while you can harvest enough of the naturally occurring grains to feed yourself most years you just won't have enough to make sweet sweet beer.
As the the OP’s question:
I read an article about how the populated areas of North America were not pristine wilderness when the Europeans arrived but were more like carefully tended gardens. The main difference being that there were not many American animals that were domesticated (there was the llama of course, did the First Nations have dogs of did they split off from the rest of the species before that happened?) so they couldn’t plow fields as easily or raise meat and so on… So instead they would have forest areas where they got rid of the underbrush so the deer would be easier to hunt, chop down the trees that were preventing fruits to grow, etc… But when the first waves of colonists arrived a stunningly high % of natives had been killed by diseases they presumable caught from earlier explorers and therefore they thought it was just naturally like this (hence the journals you can find that talk of the East Coast like it’s a new Eden). Add centuries of bigotry and misinterpretations and you arrive to the somewhat naïve image we tend to have of pre-colonial America.
Now you may think this was all a (hopefully interesting) tangent, but I don’t think it is. We can all agree (hopefully) that there is no significant difference in intelligence if any at all between the people who lived in the Fertile Crescent at the time agriculture was invented there (would they have been Semitic?) and First Nation folk, but what they made with that looked radically different. My point is that similar or even identical intelligence does not always look the same because of environmental or cultural differences. So we look at what clues early humans left behind and we think it’s closer to “true” intelligence than what orca, crows, or orangutans display today, but was it, or are we just doing the same thing the Conquistadors did? If we were able to bring back a tribe of Homo Erectus would they be better able to use their environments than a murder of crows, better at transmitting knowledge than a pod of orca? I would suspect not.

That could mean 3 things I can think of. Either the step separating that level of intelligence and what we have happened after fire, bipedalism, tool use, rudimentary language at least, and who knows how many other things arose. Or, it could be that those other species got to that roughly equivalent point differently and they reached the limit of their evolutionary strategy earlier. Finally, it could be that there was a snowball effect of whatever got us to that point for us that the other species didn’t have (I would say bigger brains lead to longer child care lead to more knowledge transmitted lead to still bigger brains, etc...). I would put my money on #3, the species mentioned have analogous “intelligence toolkits” than our predecessors did, but for whatever reason for humans we kept improving on those tools, or at least improved them much faster.

veti
2016-04-22, 12:00 AM
We can all agree (hopefully) that there is no significant difference in intelligence if any at all between the people who lived in the Fertile Crescent at the time agriculture was invented there (would they have been Semitic?) and First Nation folk, but what they made with that looked radically different.

Well, they're the same species. Algonquins and Babylonians share a common ancestor, not very far back. Their basic biology would be pretty much identical, the big differences being a product of socialisation and environment. (But those differences would be big, because Newfoundland and Mesopotamia are quite different places. Also there would, I guess, have been several thousand years of technological and cultural development between the settlement of the two areas.)



My point is that similar or even identical intelligence does not always look the same because of environmental or cultural differences. So we look at what clues early humans left behind and we think it’s closer to “true” intelligence than what orca, crows, or orangutans display today, but was it, or are we just doing the same thing the Conquistadors did? If we were able to bring back a tribe of Homo Erectus would they be better able to use their environments than a murder of crows, better at transmitting knowledge than a pod of orca? I would suspect not.

Well, the Conquistadors found people who didn't understand their culture or technology - but could learn it. If we discovered a long-lost tribe of Homo Erectus, the adults all died of culture shock, and we raised the children as our own - would they fit in and grow up much the same as us? I have no idea.

What I am sure about, though, is that if we discovered an alien tribe of lizardpeople and the same thing happened, their children would never fit in and grow up the same as us. That's because physiology and psychology are closely connected. Just about everything we think about, everything we care about, is related in some way to our bodies.

Imagine if you didn't know what it means to "feel" anything - hungry, or thirsty, or sleepy, or horny, cold, tired, hot, cramped, pain, the need to poop, the sensation of taste or smell... What would your massive, disembodied brain actually think about, without all that sensory input? (Incidentally, this is one of the biggest problems with the idea of loading human consciousness into a computer - having uploaded it, in what sense is it still "human"? - but that's another discussion.)

Now, obviously lizardpeople would feel most of these things. But they'd feel them in quite different measures and ways from us, and that would make them - I think - a very different kind of people, even if their raw intelligence (as measured by whatever test we can all agree on) turns out to be identical.

Avilan the Grey
2016-04-24, 12:35 PM
Regarding agriculture:

I have read several reports pointing out that (back then, without overpopulation) if you lived as a hunter-gatherer you had a better source of food, actually BUT it was a less RELIANT source of food.
Basically you traded high-protein diet 9 months a year for a steady, low-protein diet 12 months a year + more defensible location and more comfortable living conditions.

NichG
2016-04-24, 12:53 PM
What I am sure about, though, is that if we discovered an alien tribe of lizardpeople and the same thing happened, their children would never fit in and grow up the same as us. That's because physiology and psychology are closely connected. Just about everything we think about, everything we care about, is related in some way to our bodies.

Imagine if you didn't know what it means to "feel" anything - hungry, or thirsty, or sleepy, or horny, cold, tired, hot, cramped, pain, the need to poop, the sensation of taste or smell... What would your massive, disembodied brain actually think about, without all that sensory input? (Incidentally, this is one of the biggest problems with the idea of loading human consciousness into a computer - having uploaded it, in what sense is it still "human"? - but that's another discussion.)

Now, obviously lizardpeople would feel most of these things. But they'd feel them in quite different measures and ways from us, and that would make them - I think - a very different kind of people, even if their raw intelligence (as measured by whatever test we can all agree on) turns out to be identical.

There's some hints that the body may matter less than the thing the body is 'for', as it were. It's pretty easy for a person to learn to 'see' with the end of a stick, or do other kinds of prosthetic adaptations, and the timescale for even very overt things like inverting the image entering the eyes get automatically adapted to within a week or so.

There's also already some evidence of this in machine learning as well. Specifically, I'm thinking of adversarial examples in image processing. If you train a neural network or a support vector machine or a random forest or whatever on some image classification task, usually there's some really tiny but very specific perturbation you can add to the image to cause the machine learning algorithm to output a specific response, regardless of what the original image actually is. The really weird thing though is that the exact same peculiar perturbation will often cause other, unrelated machine learning algorithms trained on the same task to malfunction in the same way.

That is to say, in those cases at least the vulnerability in the algorithm had to do more with the task than the architecture (something like its 'body'). One algorithm might be assembling a list of hierarchical if-then statements, while another algorithm might be doing a chain of matrix multiplications, and the third might be finding the distance to the nearest three examples in the training set or something like that, and despite the differences in how they work, they all share the same kind of highly specific optical illusions.

So my guess would be that by the time you're talking about higher levels of intelligence, these things get increasingly fluid, interchangeable, and adaptive. Another way to put it would be, while an intelligence might be adapted to its body, at the same time the initial evolutionary benefit of intelligence (e.g. before you get all sorts of meta things like society and language and ideas and so on) is to adapt to the things that can't be adapted to by evolution - e.g. by hard-coding into the body. So if a member of the species loses an arm but might be able to still survive, rather than sitting there wobbling because all the hard-coded motion controllers assumed an arm would be there and accounted for that in their period of oscillation, its brain attempts to act as an adaptor between 'behaviors that worked with two arms' and 'body that now has one arm'.

halfeye
2016-04-25, 07:17 AM
So after binging too much Neil Degrasse Tyson, i started wondering exactly what were the conditions present in the specie just before the Australopithecus that allowed us to first start using tools, fire and language (the three most important elements to our evolutionary leaps).

I mean, some species on Earth use tools. That didnt made them intelligent like we actually understand it. What was present that allowed our ancestors to develop intelligence as a genuine advantage? The idea is to nail the conditions so that any other specie (perhaps alien, or Dinosaur) with the same characteristics could actually reach the state of tool users.

- First is probably the opposable thumb. Originally meant as a mean to easily grasp branches and climb. This, or at least something like it, is required for proper and delicate tool use.

- Omnivorous characteristics. Or at least, an early feeding from either environmental foods source (like plants) and mobile (animals). Meat-based nutrition is richer in protein and is essential in developing Predatorial hunting behavior. Whereas environment-based nutrition lead to observe and understand a specie's environment and analyze its effect, which could lead to early herbalism.

- While we were originally forest-dwellers (due to the opposable thumb) our early specie migrated to the plains, developping a bipedal method of locomotion. I think the one clear genetic advantage early humans had over all other specie really had a big influence there: efficient heat dissipation. Early humans could keep up with their prey for unnatural long period of time, until their preys would collapse of exhaustion. Early humans could track and trail preys for hours.

And this is, i believe, the key. Tracking without a super sense of smell required early humans to study their environment to figure out where their prey went so they could keep up. The members of that specie who were the most intelligent (best adapted at tracking) had a clear advantage over those who were dumber, more animalistic.

Our method of hunting and gathering led us to observe, understand. This, for the first time, meant that cognitive process was a clear evolutionary advantage over rivals. With better cognitive capacity came tools, fire, language. All of those snowballed into ever more cognitive capacity. Until we reached Homos Sapient.

Do you think there might be other means of developping human-grade intelligence? There are characteristics i speculated on who aren't as important as previously claimed?

I don't think we know what intelligence is, much less what it takes to make it.

Hofstadter calls computers Fast Stupids in GEB, and that's what they are. Very fast, very simple. They add and subtract 0 from 1 trillions of times per second. Everything else is software written by fallible humans. Since humans don't know what intelligence is, the chances of machine intelligence are remote.

veti
2016-04-25, 03:53 PM
I don't think we know what intelligence is, much less what it takes to make it.

Hofstadter calls computers Fast Stupids in GEB, and that's what they are. Very fast, very simple. They add and subtract 0 from 1 trillions of times per second. Everything else is software written by fallible humans. Since humans don't know what intelligence is, the chances of machine intelligence are remote.

The non-sequitur there is the assumption that you need to know what intelligence is, in order to create it.

Counter-example: your mom.

Grinner
2016-04-25, 09:11 PM
I don't think we know what intelligence is, much less what it takes to make it.

Hofstadter calls computers Fast Stupids in GEB, and that's what they are. Very fast, very simple. They add and subtract 0 from 1 trillions of times per second. Everything else is software written by fallible humans. Since humans don't know what intelligence is, the chances of machine intelligence are remote.

Don't sell us so short. We have ideas about the nature of intelligence. It's a multifaceted concept which can get thrown in with a bunch of different things, so it's difficult to give a general definition of it. That doesn't mean people haven't tried, though.

Setting aside religious theories of the mind, there's a bunch of researchers who have worked on this sort of thing. There's a guy named Jeff Hawkins who has spent the last decade or so distilling an algorithm for intelligence from neuroscience studies. His idea is that intelligence is the ability to form predictions based on past experience. Ray Kurzweil published a book containing a similar proposition in 2012. Hofstadter has proposed that intelligence is the ability to make analogies. Still others (Patrick Winston of MIT comes to mind) believe that language is the key to intelligence.


The non-sequitur there is the assumption that you need to know what intelligence is, in order to create it.

Counter-example: your mom.

It doesn't hurt, yes? It's hard to hit a target when you can't see it.

georgie_leech
2016-04-25, 09:47 PM
It doesn't hurt, yes? It's hard to hit a target when you can't see it.

I think the idea was that methods to create intelligence don't necessarily require you understand what intelligence is. As in, it's unlikely that anyone's mother had a perfect understanding of what intelligence is before they created what to all accounts seems a brand new intelligence. A refutation of the idea that since we don't know what intelligence is, machine learning won't lead to it.

It certainly would be easier though if we knew what it was :smallbiggrin:

Grinner
2016-04-25, 10:00 PM
I think the idea was that methods to create intelligence don't necessarily require you understand what intelligence is. As in, it's unlikely that anyone's mother had a perfect understanding of what intelligence is before they created what to all accounts seems a brand new intelligence. A refutation of the idea that since we don't know what intelligence is, machine learning won't lead to it.

It certainly would be easier though if we knew what it was :smallbiggrin:

I think it might be useful to make a distinction between creating and designing here. When a mother creates a child, she's tapping into the eons of trial and error called "evolution". To design an intelligence, a framework or theory would be needed at some point.

While design and evolution are not entirely divorced concepts, humans do have difficulty designing something they have no understanding of. Once the design is in place, though, it's relatively simple to create something from it.

veti
2016-04-26, 04:47 AM
I think it might be useful to make a distinction between creating and designing here. When a mother creates a child, she's tapping into the eons of trial and error called "evolution". To design an intelligence, a framework or theory would be needed at some point.

Sure, but "design" doesn't have to enter into it at all. Scientists have already found ways to use and accelerate evolution for their own ends. Also, ways to simulate evolution, specifically evolution of computer algorithms. What that latter thing amounts to is a way to create software without knowing in advance what you are going to create.

Intelligence is an emergent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence) property. The attraction of neural nets is precisely that they behave in a way that is very hard to model with conventional computing; therefore, it's hard to predict with confidence exactly what a neural net will do in a given case.

Proposition: the Internet, as a whole, is already a good deal more intelligent than most, if not all, of the humans using it.

NichG
2016-04-26, 05:38 AM
Sure, but "design" doesn't have to enter into it at all. Scientists have already found ways to use and accelerate evolution for their own ends. Also, ways to simulate evolution, specifically evolution of computer algorithms. What that latter thing amounts to is a way to create software without knowing in advance what you are going to create.

Intelligence is an emergent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence) property. The attraction of neural nets is precisely that they behave in a way that is very hard to model with conventional computing; therefore, it's hard to predict with confidence exactly what a neural net will do in a given case.

Proposition: the Internet, as a whole, is already a good deal more intelligent than most, if not all, of the humans using it.

Actually, all this does is to move the difficulty around. In traditional direct design, you need to know 'how' to make the thing you want happen. The upside there is you can just try things and see if you like what happens better than what you set out to do in the first place (e.g. its relatively easy to have serendipity happen), because you're directly involved in the iterative design process.

In evolutionary design (including things like machine learning), you need to know how to define success, but you don't get to specify much about how it is achieved. If you have a bad definition of success, the evolutionary/neural algorithm can and will find out how to cheat it.

So in a way, its actually harder to find emergent stuff when you're using evolutionary design, because when the algorithm finds something that has a low fitness but has something unexpectedly interesting about it... often that means it silently throws it out because it had a low fitness, and you never get to notice. Of course you can watch it as it converges, develop meta-metrics, do all sorts of things to correct for this.

Grinner
2016-04-26, 06:00 AM
Untrue. Evolutionary algorithms typically require four things: an initial pool of candidate solutions, a breeding function, a mutation function, and a selection function. In each round of evolution, the breeding function expands the pool of candidate solutions by recombining existing candidate solutions. Occasionally, the mutation function will be called, which will tweak a candidate ever so slightly in order to introduce variation into the pool. After the pool has been expanded sufficiently, the selection function then comes in and culls unsuitable candidates.

Here's the thing: if you don't know what you're looking for, how will you decide what's unsuitable and what's not? NASA used an evolutionary algorithm to design a super-efficient antenna, but if they didn't understand how electromagnetic radiation worked, how would they have run the simulations required to decide how good a particular design was? They certainly weren't going to make and test each candidate by hand.

Intelligence is kind of a special case, though. Intelligence is a very intangible property; you can't exactly evolve for intelligence directly. At least, it would be very difficult to do so. The reason for this is that evolution tends to produce the simplest solution possible. It doesn't create candidate solutions for what you intended; it creates candidate solutions for what you tested for. Thus, you would need a test which comprehensively and unambiguously requires intelligence to complete. At the moment, daseinskampf* appears to be the only viable test, but even that's not a sure bet. Generating intelligent agents in such a way would require an understanding of how intelligence arises to meet the challenges presented by the environment, including other agents (i.e. what we've been discussing in this thread).

In the end, evolutionary algorithms are labor-saving methods. They let you design something without worrying about the low-level details. However, they don't excuse you from understanding the subject to some degree.

*German for "survival-struggle", I believe? Maybe "active competition" would be a good translation?

Edit: *Sigh* Nevermind. NichG's explanation is better.


Proposition: the Internet, as a whole, is already a good deal more intelligent than most, if not all, of the humans using it.

I could buy that.

Frozen_Feet
2016-04-26, 06:13 AM
The non-sequitur there is the assumption that you need to know what intelligence is, in order to create it.

Counter-example: your mom.

Best "your mom" joke ever. :smallamused:

Re: internet being "smart": if internet userbase follows normal distribution of intelligence, being more intelligent than majority of users might be possible, but at the same time, not very impressive.

BannedInSchool
2016-04-26, 09:27 AM
Here's the thing: if you don't know what you're looking for, how will you decide what's unsuitable and what's not?
Obviously you just create a mutable evaluation function and evolve that too. :smallwink:

NichG
2016-04-26, 10:28 AM
Obviously you just create a mutable evaluation function and evolve that too. :smallwink:

This works, but is harder than it sounds. Tried training a DCGAN recently and its really finnicky. Also makes it hard to tell if it has converged or not.

halfeye
2016-04-26, 12:35 PM
Fifty years ago, AI was at least 20 years in the future, now AI is at least 20 years in the future. We've made some progress, but it's one of those


The more you know, the more you know there is still to learn.

things.


Intelligence is an emergent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence) property.
That's a guess. it might be right, but we just don't know for sure. For example, a radio reciever isn't something that emerges from a random bunch of electronic bits, they have to be organised in a certain way. I personally suspect intelligence is like that, I too could be wrong, one day maybe we'll find out.

NichG
2016-04-26, 04:59 PM
You can have emergent and non-emergent sources of the same function. For example, you can design an audio processing algorithm and tie it to a feedback controller and a microphone, or you can have something like Pask's Ear where it emerges spontaneously from an electrochemical system.

veti
2016-04-26, 11:23 PM
That's a guess. it might be right, but we just don't know for sure. For example, a radio reciever isn't something that emerges from a random bunch of electronic bits, they have to be organised in a certain way.

Not necessarily (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=367925). I mean, sure, that's how radio receivers are made, but "made" isn't the only way they can come about.

In the case of "intelligence", I would argue that: not being able to define it or design it, it's actually more likely that we will create it by accident (and entirely possible that we've already done it). Especially as we go about combining systems that are themselves already quite complex, in ever more complex ways. In that environment, it seems to me pretty near inevitable that we're going to end up creating "things" that nobody foresaw.

halfeye
2016-04-27, 06:49 AM
Not necessarily (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=367925)

I suspect those people were hallucinating.

If you bung a lot of push-bike bits in a bag and shake it, one time in a billion, you might get a bike out, but there's no way you'll get a jet plane or a car out.

We don't know what intelligence is, so we don't know what we need in the metaphorical bag.


there's a bunch of researchers who have worked on this sort of thing. There's a guy named Jeff Hawkins who has spent the last decade or so distilling an algorithm for intelligence from neuroscience studies. His idea is that intelligence is the ability to form predictions based on past experience. Ray Kurzweil published a book containing a similar proposition in 2012. Hofstadter has proposed that intelligence is the ability to make analogies. Still others (Patrick Winston of MIT comes to mind) believe that language is the key to intelligence.

While research is generally a good thing, I'm pretty sure language isn't intelligence, because aphasia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia


The difficulties of people with aphasia can range from occasional trouble finding words to losing the ability to speak, read, or write; intelligence, however, is unaffected.

I concede that that's a definition of intelligence, however it's a definition I agree with.

Grinner
2016-04-27, 09:33 PM
While research is generally a good thing, I'm pretty sure language isn't intelligence, because aphasia.

In Winston's defense, we don't know what the fitness landscape of intelligence looks like. It's entirely possible that there is more than one variety of intelligence possible. Note that I'm not talking about multiple intelligences as in different aptitudes which all normal humans possess to one degree or another, like the psychological theory of multiple intelligences. I'm talking about the possibility of distinct species of intelligence. Is the human modality of intelligence the global optimum, or are we merely a local optimum?

Something NichG said earlier suggests to me that we're a local optimum, but I suppose that depends on how you define intelligence.

Cikomyr
2016-05-02, 04:31 PM
While research is generally a good thing, I'm pretty sure language isn't intelligence, because aphasia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia

I concede that that's a definition of intelligence, however it's a definition I agree with.

But that's.. Different. I mean, it not like Aphasia is a standard characteristic of a society made of otherwise intelligent individuals.

Aphasia is considered an ailment to be cured/treated, because its considered second nature to our human brains to have the ability to communicate. The fact that we developped such interesting vocal capacity as a specie alongside our brainpower is, in my opinion, good evidence.

People with Aphasia can survive as part of society, but only because we have reached a stage of cognitive ability that we can deal with it.

halfeye
2016-05-02, 05:39 PM
But that's.. Different. I mean, it not like Aphasia is a standard characteristic of a society made of otherwise intelligent individuals.

Aphasia is considered an ailment to be cured/treated, because its considered second nature to our human brains to have the ability to communicate.

You can't cure strokes. Those bits of brain have shuffled off this mortal coil, they wouldn't voom if you put 5 million volts through them. TIAs are different, by definition, 24 hours to full recovery is the definition. Aphasia when it comes from strokes is not as such treatable. The brain is a very adaptable organ, and other parts of it can be repurposed to do the things that a stroke destroys, and it may well be possible for an aphasia patient to learn to use language again, but that's not the same as recovering lost intelligence, the intelligence was present but masked while language was missing.

Lorsa
2016-05-03, 06:07 AM
You can't cure strokes. Those bits of brain have shuffled off this mortal coil, they wouldn't voom if you put 5 million volts through them. TIAs are different, by definition, 24 hours to full recovery is the definition. Aphasia when it comes from strokes is not as such treatable. The brain is a very adaptable organ, and other parts of it can be repurposed to do the things that a stroke destroys, and it may well be possible for an aphasia patient to learn to use language again, but that's not the same as recovering lost intelligence, the intelligence was present but masked while language was missing.

Perhaps this is the key ingredient in intelligence really; brain plasticity.

Humans can have their brains do any number of things, stretching it to the limit of what Evolution has given us. The majority of both animals and computers, are not even close to achieving the same level of fluidity.

Not sure how that helps figuring out what conditions lead to intelligence, but I guess diversity of surrounding is one thing.

NichG
2016-05-03, 06:43 AM
What's the basis for comparing human, animal, and computer plasticities?

Lorsa
2016-05-04, 01:36 AM
What's the basis for comparing human, animal, and computer plasticities?

I am not sure to be honest, it just seems like the 'Thing' to look for, if any can be selected. Basically it boils down to ability to break or change the "original" programming, adapt to new situations, and use processes meant for one thing for something else.

NichG
2016-05-04, 02:43 AM
I am not sure to be honest, it just seems like the 'Thing' to look for, if any can be selected. Basically it boils down to ability to break or change the "original" programming, adapt to new situations, and use processes meant for one thing for something else.

Well, for example, animals seem to have the same kind of low-level plasticity that humans have. There are studies involving rerouting senses around brain damage - things like using right-wards sensing parts of the brain to process signals from the left after the left-wards sensing parts have been damaged (this particular one in bats). But that's not necessarily the same as what you're talking about.

Computers have their own kind of plasticity which is kind of idiosyncratic. There's lots of transfer learning stuff these days using for example an object-classifier network as an initial starting point for more focused vision tasks.

veti
2016-05-04, 06:22 AM
I am not sure to be honest, it just seems like the 'Thing' to look for, if any can be selected. Basically it boils down to ability to break or change the "original" programming, adapt to new situations, and use processes meant for one thing for something else.

Note that you're framing the definition in the language of computing: "programming", "processes". You're also talking about processes being "meant" for something, which is a troublesome concept that introduces a lot of baggage in its own right.

Could you give an example of a (human or animal) brain "process" that's been adapted to a purpose other than what you think it was "meant" for?


Well, for example, animals seem to have the same kind of low-level plasticity that humans have. There are studies involving rerouting senses around brain damage - things like using right-wards sensing parts of the brain to process signals from the left after the left-wards sensing parts have been damaged (this particular one in bats). But that's not necessarily the same as what you're talking about.

You could also talk about animals that have adapted from the environment they evolved in, to thrive in something quite different. Ex: pigeons, rats, urban foxes - basically, anything that does well in cities would potentially be an example, by Lorsa's description.

Computers show countless real, practical examples of behaviour "meant" (that word again - it's much less problematic in the context of computers) for one thing being used for something else. That's why I've got a firewall and virus checker. Indeed, that's one arguable criterion for something to be called a "computer", rather than a mere calculator or phone or controller - that it can be used for more purposes than the creator ever consciously imagined.

"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." That's a famous quote illustrating the plasticity of the internet - from more than 20 years ago. Think how much it's grown since 1993.

Lorsa
2016-05-12, 07:51 AM
Well, for example, animals seem to have the same kind of low-level plasticity that humans have. There are studies involving rerouting senses around brain damage - things like using right-wards sensing parts of the brain to process signals from the left after the left-wards sensing parts have been damaged (this particular one in bats). But that's not necessarily the same as what you're talking about.

Computers have their own kind of plasticity which is kind of idiosyncratic. There's lots of transfer learning stuff these days using for example an object-classifier network as an initial starting point for more focused vision tasks.

It's partly what I was talking about, and partly not.

The human brain is able to perform a large number of tasks. If we just go with tool use, there seem to be no limit to the number of tools we can be trained to use (and it certainly exceeds that of any other animal with a factor of a lot). Every single new tool used is a test of human brain plasticity. We can also go by the type of thinking we can learn (which was not present at the time when our brain evolved); such as abstract mathematics, hypothetical thinking and the like.



Note that you're framing the definition in the language of computing: "programming", "processes". You're also talking about processes being "meant" for something, which is a troublesome concept that introduces a lot of baggage in its own right.

Could you give an example of a (human or animal) brain "process" that's been adapted to a purpose other than what you think it was "meant" for?

Like I mentioned above, abstract mathematics is a (evolutionary speaking) new thing. While I agree that agency should not be ascribed to evolution (in fact, I think that reading agency into things that doesn't have one is one of those weird cognitive processes that was good once but now end up fooling us), I was trying to phrase it in a way that would help compare what early humans used their brain processes for, and what we use them for today.

I must admit that I am a loss for defining "process" in this sense. My main point is more or less that the human brain has remained mostly identical for the past 100 000 years or so, but the things we do with it has changed dramatically. We used to apply our cognitive processes to hunting, finding good places to build shelter, and tell poisonous plants from edible. Today we use them to calculate gravitational waves and build space stations. I am not aware of any animal that has moved so far away from their early evolutionary type of environment in the way they use their cognitive functions.



You could also talk about animals that have adapted from the environment they evolved in, to thrive in something quite different. Ex: pigeons, rats, urban foxes - basically, anything that does well in cities would potentially be an example, by Lorsa's description.

I am not claiming we are different from other animals by some boolean variable. It is a matter of scale. Also, in my mind I think more importance is put on the type of things we can be trained to do, and not the number of environments we have been adapted to.

I think you can teach any single human more "tricks" than all the dogs, apes, dolphins, elephants and pigs put together.


Computers show countless real, practical examples of behaviour "meant" (that word again - it's much less problematic in the context of computers) for one thing being used for something else. That's why I've got a firewall and virus checker. Indeed, that's one arguable criterion for something to be called a "computer", rather than a mere calculator or phone or controller - that it can be used for more purposes than the creator ever consciously imagined.

"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." That's a famous quote illustrating the plasticity of the internet - from more than 20 years ago. Think how much it's grown since 1993.

When we talk about computers, I think we need to talk about a single computer program. I am not familiar with any computer hardware which spontaneously starts running processes. So, how many different tasks can your virus checker do? Can it be trained to function as a word processor (by something other than changing its programming)? Is it possible to use a copy of Final Fantasy [whatever] to play Call of Duty? In fact, computer programs has a very limited plasticity. They do what they do, unless their code is changed.

Grinner
2016-05-12, 08:45 AM
I must admit that I am a loss for defining "process" in this sense. My main point is more or less that the human brain has remained mostly identical for the past 100 000 years or so, but the things we do with it has changed dramatically. We used to apply our cognitive processes to hunting, finding good places to build shelter, and tell poisonous plants from edible. Today we use them to calculate gravitational waves and build space stations. I am not aware of any animal that has moved so far away from their early evolutionary type of environment in the way they use their cognitive functions.

I once heard a lecture in which it was asserted that intelligence is not a function of the complexity of the organism. Instead, it's a function of the complexity of the environment. Admittedly, I don't know of any animal that has mastered tasks like e-mail, but it seems to me that something along these lines is very true of child development.


When we talk about computers, I think we need to talk about a single computer program. I am not familiar with any computer hardware which spontaneously starts running processes. So, how many different tasks can your virus checker do? Can it be trained to function as a word processor (by something other than changing its programming)? Is it possible to use a copy of Final Fantasy [whatever] to play Call of Duty? In fact, computer programs has a very limited plasticity. They do what they do, unless their code is changed.

I think you might be misunderstanding veti. The quote about the Internet routing around censorship refers to human usage patterns, not hardware. You could look at the Internet as being a macrocosm of the humans that comprise it.

But while we're talking about programs, it should be noted that a program is just a set of commands, commands for which the instructions and data are often segregated into different compartments. This is different from biological control mechanisms (biological neural networks), in which the instructions and the data are one and the same.

I would propose that the function of the brain, specifically the cerebral cortex, is to adapt. However, there are other portions of the brain which are not nearly as flexible in their utility. Their function is hardcoded. Similarly, there are programs which are hardcoded in their functionality, and perhaps mirroring the development of the human brain, we are beginning to develop programs which are more flexible.

veti
2016-05-13, 07:35 AM
When we talk about computers, I think we need to talk about a single computer program. I am not familiar with any computer hardware which spontaneously starts running processes. So, how many different tasks can your virus checker do? Can it be trained to function as a word processor (by something other than changing its programming)? Is it possible to use a copy of Final Fantasy [whatever] to play Call of Duty? In fact, computer programs has a very limited plasticity. They do what they do, unless their code is changed.

(Maybe you're too young to remember Excel 97 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gYb5GUs0dM)...?)

Obviously, if software is going to do something different from what it currently does, its programming has to be changed. (Or its environment, that'll do it too.) But that's not really different from a human. The only difference is one of degree, not of kind - it's ridiculously easy to reprogram a human, so much so that it happens unintentionally all the time (it's harder, though far from impossible, to do it intentionally and predictably).

But increasingly, the same is true of computers. In practice, the software on my machine changes all the damn' time. From updates, obviously, but also from the dozens of processes that are running in the background that I don't even know about, interacting in ways that not even their own programmers have fully foreseen. That's why Google returns a quarter-million hits for 'crash to desktop fallout 4'.

The entire purpose of a virus checker is to prevent programs from doing things you don't want them to do. Take Microsoft Word, for instance. Most people would say it's a tool for editing documents. But it's also, over the years, been used to spread viruses that do non-document-related damage.

"Spontaneously" is a big ask. Is anything truly "spontaneous"? For instance - whenever I smell a certain kind of freshly ground coffee, I'm reminded (for some reason) of a shop in a market town near where I was brought up, where (I think) I first smelled that scent. I can see the paved street, the bollards, the shop's distinctive small-pane windows. That would be a difficult and obscure association for anyone who's not me to anticipate and understand, but there's nothing "spontaneous" about it, it arises directly from my own memories.

A computer may not "spontaneously" start running processes. But, to paraphrase Arthur C Clarke: sufficiently stupid programming is indistinguishable from sponteneity (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP31lluUDWU).