Jump to content
Science Forums

Bigger Brains/higher Conciousness


SaxonViolence

Recommended Posts

So what is your best guess how we can brew up a Super-Genius.....

My best guess is that we first need to understand in detail how the brain produces behavior, in the course of doing so validating the reductionistic assumption that it does, invalidating mystical assumptions that it does not.

 

That done, I’d use a computerized genetic algorithm-based program to select incremental variations of current brain anatomy and physiology for their fitness evaluated against the various criteria you propose – winning at chess, amazing mathematicians – and similar criteria, not skimping on the less formal arts (eg: play guitar at least as well as Hendrix), individually and in various combinations.

 

Whether a single brain design could win the fitness metric contest for many or all criteria is a question I find fascinating, but can’t even guess at an answer.

 

Note that I’m assuming these computer modeled brains are not “brains in a box”, isolated from interactive sensory interaction with a modeled outside world, including other modeled people. By practical necessity, as we’d want the results of the program quickly, this outside world would have to be simulated, as the real physical world can’t be arbitrarily sped up to match a faster than realtime brain simulation.

 

It’s worth noting that such a computerized model of even a “baseline” person/brain/mind would be, a kind of super-genius, simply by virtue of the potential ability to think ordinary thoughts many times faster than normal – what transhumanists term a “weak superintelligence”. For example, an inferior but competent chess player given years to consider and research each move could almost surely beat a far superior player given minutes per move, were such an arrangement physically possible.

 

Sticking to this weak/strong naming convention and replacing “super-genius” with “superintelligence”, the question arises if a strong superintelligence can be designed within the constraints of animal neuroanatomy/physiology. Because we brains in human bodies can carry out any know computation using tools (paper and pencil, computers, etc) that will be available to the simulated brains, this is not a question of ability, but one of creativity. In short, is any computer program constrained to model a brain able to invent a way of thinking qualitatively different enough from the norm to be considered “strong” rather “weak”.

 

This question can be rephrased into many illustrative examples:

  • Can one or more dogs, given enough all their material needs and enough time, either become human, or able to describe how they could become human or a human being be made en novo (from scratch)?
  • Can one or more human, given enough all their material needs and enough time, either become strong superintelligences, or able to describe how they could become strong superintelligences, or how to make a strong superintelligence.

If we think about the first example question, something obvious comes to the fore: it seems unlikely its answer is yes, because it seems unlikely any number of dogs have any drive or desire to become or create a human. Dogs simply don’t seem to have such a kind of desires. They want “dog things” – food, security, companionship, fun, to procreate, etc. We humans, on the other hand, clearly do have this kind of desire, evidenced by this thread and countless discussions like it. This quality seems to make us clearly, qualitatively different than dogs, and as best I can tell, from every other animal, including whales, dolphins, and the other great apes. Wonderfully human-like as they are, even trained language-using apes have not, to the best of my knowledge, ever expressed a desire to be or create a “stronger intelligence”.

 

In his 2007 I Am a Strange Loop (which I consider, vaguely, a sequel to his more famous 1979 Godel, Escher, Bach) Doug Hofstadter proposes that this qualitative difference in dog vs. human brains is because

We humans ... are universal machines of a different sort: our neural hardware can copy arbitrary patterns ...

and

... dog’s brains are not universal.

If Hofstadter is correct in his conclusion about such a universal/not universal dichotomy among thinking, feeling beings, I’m inclined to affirm that humans can become or create strong superintelligences. I’ve a hunch he is, and we can.

 

I still see a couple of possible negations outstanding:

 

First, as we’ve never seen unambiguous evidence of a strong superintelligence, they may be a semantic null – that is, a thing for which a name exists that cannot physically exist. Incrementally stonger, yet still weak superintelligences may be as smart as any thinking machine can get. I’m not too alarmed by this prospect, as the strong/weak dichotomy seem to me essentially a semantic one. Practically, if a weak superintelligence can fix the superintelligence-requiring problem of the moment for me, I’m content.

 

Second, possibility that the concept of a social superorganism may be applicable to the question. For a long time, and increasingly, the ability of a social collection of humans has exceeded that of any individual. It stands to reason, then, that a strong superintelligence already exists, and it is the superorganism consisting of all of us collectively. In the same sense that the individual cells of our bodies are unaware, and qualitatively incapable of being aware, that they are part of a smarter individual, or that such an individual is possible, we may be unable to understand that we are in a similar way part of a smarter individual, or that such an individual can exist.

 

I’m not too alarmed by this prospect either, as if we are, as I believe, universal thinking machines, we should be able, if not in a viscerally satisfying moment of complete comprehension, at least in a formal, methodical way, understand if this is the case, and to some extent participate in and shape it. Unlike a cell in our bodies to us, we are not different from the superorganism of all of us that may exist in the universality of our thinking.

 

Still, on an emotional level, the social superorganism idea is disturbing, as despite our shared universal thinking trait, the superorganism may not empathically care for us individual humans any more than we care for shed skin cells.

 

It’s best, I think, not to over-emotionalize ideas like these.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This is slightly off-topic, but a good learning opportunity on the subject of biological evolution and “unnatural (that is, human influenced) selection”.

 

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/data/2002/01/01/html/ft_20020101.1.html

 

this is stating that wolves learned to be nice to humans

hence , a learned behavior,

:Exclamati You’ve got to be careful with statements like “<some species> learned <some behavior>”, not to confuse them with statements like “<some individual> learned <some behavior>”.

 

For example, in the case of the pre-historic domestication of wolves/dogs, the species “learned” to like humans – a more apt description, I think, is “join our pack” – thought the combined influences of evolutionary selection. Adults and pups who didn’t tolerate being handled by humans weren’t kept – were either chased away, or killed. Humans didn’t capture and tame an entire pack of wolves by teaching each individual to tolerate human handling. Literally, by conscious human decision (maybe – it’s also a reasonable hypothesis that, as we continue to to this day, prehistoric humans simply found wolf pups cute, and decided to care for them for that reason), the sub-population of wolves that would evolve into dogs was selected from the larger population of wolves that would and would not.

 

Back on topic ...

Though being domesticated as a species is not an example of an individual wolf/dog learning, individuals of these and most other mammal species, including humans, certainly learn behaviors. In post #35, I argue, echoing Hofstadter’s argument, that there is a key qualitative difference between how humans and nearly if not all other terrestrial animals think and learn, measured by a quality Hofstadter calls “representational universality”, which humans, but apparently no other animals, even the other great apes, have.

 

I think answers to the question of “how to cogitate better – and deeper”, and what better and deeper objectively means, and whether the related transhumanist distinction between weak and strong superintelligence refer is a similar qualitative distinction. That is, does a categorization of intelligences into not-universal, universal, and strongly superintelligent reference physically real states, or is there only not-universal, and a continuum of inferior and superior universal intelligences?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I had pictured the Partnership of Man and Dog to have started when wolves come walking into early Man's Encampments--

 

The wolves came partly to scavenge the trash piles and rubbish heaps--and to gawk at such creatures.

 

Eventually folks largely accepted the wolves. Maybe during prosperous times, a Man might throw a few choice pieces of meat to his favorites.

 

At some point, the wolves started following the Humans when they went hunting.

 

So far as the wolves were concerned, they had already accepted the Humans as Pack members.

 

The village wolves were probably pretty touchy and crabby in their new role as man's best friend.

 

Is what happened next an example of Selective Breeding (Though almost certainly largely unconsciously at first) or Evolution?

 

Or are they one and the same?

 

Saxon Violence

Edited by SaxonViolence
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Evolution is the change of populations over generations due to different expressions of heritable traits. Natural selection is the most common method that one trait is selected over another, but selective breeding is another method that drives evolution. Some refer to this as artificial selection, but I personally don't care for the term, as it perpetuates the view that humans operate "outside" of their environment, and therefore changes in the environment caused by humans are artificial. For example, many plants and their pollinators evolve together, I don't see anything fundamentally different between that and our co-evolution with dogs.

 

For an example of the processes that may have happened in the transformation from the grey wolf to the domestic dog*, look at the case of the silver fox.

Belyaev believed that the key factor selected for in the domestication of dogs was not size or reproduction, but behavior; specifically, amenability to domestication, or tameability. He selected for low flight distance, that is, the distance one can approach the animal before it runs away. Selecting this behavior mimics the natural selection that must have occurred in the ancestral past of dogs. More than any other quality, Belyaev believed, tameability must have determined how well an animal would adapt to life among humans. Because behavior is rooted in biology, selecting for tameness and against aggression means selecting for physiological changes in the systems that govern the body's hormones and neurochemicals. Belyaev decided to test his theory by domesticating foxes; in particular, the silver fox, a dark color form of the red fox. He placed a population of them in the same process of domestication, and he decided to submit this population to strong selection pressure for inherent tameness.

 

The result is that Russian scientists now have a number of domesticated foxes that are fundamentally different in temperament and behavior from their wild forebears. Some important changes in physiology and morphology are now visible, such as mottled or spotted colored fur. Many scientists believe that these changes related to selection for tameness are caused by lower adrenaline production in the new breed, causing physiological changes in very few generations and thus yielding genetic combinations not present in the original species. This indicates that selection for tameness (i.e. low flight distance) produces changes that are also influential on the emergence of other "dog-like" traits, such as raised tail and coming into heat every six months rather than annually.

 

*I am just starting to come to terms with the changes in biology since my high school education in the 80s. One of the biggest is the adoption of cladistics to replace the familiar kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species method of classification. As such, domesticated dogs would more correctly be referred to as Canis lupus familiaris, as they are indeed wolves. For more information, you might find some of AronRa's youtube presentations educational.

Also, a quick google search led me to this:

Comparative analysis of morphological and behavioral characters in the domestic dog and their importance in the reconstruction of phylogenetic relationships in canids

Some authors designate it with the name of Canis lupus, form familiaris. This hypothesis is based on comparative studies of dental morphology (Olsen and Olsen, 1977), behavior (Scott, 1968), and cranial morphology between domestic and wild canids (Wayne, 1986). Allozyme divergence studies suggest that Canis familiaris separated from the common trunk of Canis lupus between 325,000 to 1 million years ago (Wayne and O'Brien, 1987). The domestic dog is an extremely close relative of the gray wolf, differing from it by, at most, 0.2% mitochondrial DNA sequence (Wayne and Jenks, 1991). In comparison, the gray wolf differs from its closest wild relative, the coyote (Canis latrans), by about 4% mtDNA sequence (Wayne, 1993). Mitochondrial DNA control region sequences were analyzed by Vilà et al. (1997) from 162 wolves at 27 localities worldwide and from 140 domestic dogs representing 67 breeds. Sequences from both dogs and wolves showed considerable diversity and supported the hypothesis that wolves were the ancestors of dogs. The sequence divergence suggested that dogs originated more than 100,000 years before the present. Dogs are gray wolves, despite their diversity in size and proportion; the wide variation in their adult morphology probably results from simple changes in developmental rate and timing (Wayne, 1986, 1993). Nevertheless, the great diversity of findings from fossil remains (Scott, 1968; Olsen and Olsen, 1977; Davis and Valla, 1978) suggests multiple domestication events at different times and places. Dogs may be derived from several different ancestral gray wolf populations (Wayne, 1993). Nevertheless, according to Vilà et al. (1997), after the origin of dogs from a wolf ancestor, dogs and wolves may have continued to exchange genes. Backcrossing events could have provided part of the raw material for artifical selection and for the extraordinary degree of phenotypic diversity in the domestic dog.
Edited by JMJones0424
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'd heard about the case of the Russian Silver Foxes.

 

That means that with luck, primitive man might have managed to come up with a Dog in a human generation or two, rather than over several thousand years.

 

Didn't really think that it bore on what we were discussing.

 

I had also heard that the "Domesticated Foxes" came about serendipitously when trying to make Foxes raised for Fur a bit more Docile.

 

Along with Docility, came a number of Fur Ruining traits.

 

Neoteny-Many Dog Vs wolves traits could be rationalized as a form of Neoteny.

 

Human Selection--as opposed to fumbling blind chance--even when for much of their History, Human's had no clear conception of the underlying dynamics.....

 

We just May have found a very pivotal and and Crucial .2% of the Genome to alter; getting far more bang for the .00001 percents as they accumulated, than would ordinarily be the case in Nature.

 

Saxon Violence

 

Oh yeah, someone should look into importing the Silver Foxes to America, and market them as Pets.

 

This is probably one of the first genuine cases of Domestication in thousands of years.

Edited by SaxonViolence
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...