From AI to cephalopods, a new strain of "nature writing"(newhumanist.org.uk)
newhumanist.org.uk
From AI to cephalopods, a new strain of "nature writing"
https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/6068/intelligence-is-everywhere
56 comments
> Human history is filled with examples of us thinking we are special or at the center of the universe
For as long as science in the modern sense has existed, the scientific consensus was never that we are "at the center of the Universe" (what would that even mean?). This clichéd phrase has always been used primarily by anti-science ideologues to discredit or ridicule a claimed widespread scientific hubris.
And that humans are "special" in the sense of possessing certain qualities that place them in an entirely separate category from all other life on Earth is rather obvious. As a trivial example, humans are the only species from Earth that has traveled to another celestial body, and returned.
For as long as science in the modern sense has existed, the scientific consensus was never that we are "at the center of the Universe" (what would that even mean?). This clichéd phrase has always been used primarily by anti-science ideologues to discredit or ridicule a claimed widespread scientific hubris.
And that humans are "special" in the sense of possessing certain qualities that place them in an entirely separate category from all other life on Earth is rather obvious. As a trivial example, humans are the only species from Earth that has traveled to another celestial body, and returned.
> Human history is filled with examples of us thinking we are special or at the center of the universe, etc
That behavior pattern is new, and it goes back to semitic religions. Otherwise before those the general religious format was that humans were part of a larger world in which everything was connected and never everything else was 'for the humans'. (Semitic religions explicitly say that).
That behavior pattern is new, and it goes back to semitic religions. Otherwise before those the general religious format was that humans were part of a larger world in which everything was connected and never everything else was 'for the humans'. (Semitic religions explicitly say that).
> After 250 years of humanity (well, some of humanity…) confidently atop the great pyramid of being, we in the west are becoming more aware that we might, perhaps, have company
What if we are the only species of the bunch that was unable to perceive this, it makes us the unintelligent ones
What if we are the only species of the bunch that was unable to perceive this, it makes us the unintelligent ones
It takes lots of smarts to fool yourself.
No, we perceive it. It's just the other species to us are food. It's a different perspective to be the diner or the meal.
One of the best books about animal intelligence and personality is over 100 years old.
https://wikiless.org/wiki/Wild_Animals_I_Have_Known?lang=en
https://wikiless.org/wiki/Wild_Animals_I_Have_Known?lang=en
Intelligence is not in AI, and is not likely to end up there in the lifetime of anyone old enough to read this on their own.
AI’s hallucinations are not dissimilar enough from intelligence for me to make a distinctive standard
You'd be surprised what you'd hear, if you could hear inside someone's head. I bet it's not at all unlike an AI, that "inner monologue".
It some ways it's like in the brain there's a '(intelligent) random noise generator' that just throws out ideas and associations, and an 'identifier' that highlights ideas that are useful. Just keep this running all day and you're bound to get some useful ideas just through trial and error.
This is why I think going for a walk is so helpful to thinking, it's like jiggling the mouse when generating crypto keys: it ups the entropy
At one point people said that computers could never beat a human at chess, then it was GO, now it is reasoning, then it will be intelligence.
Ah no, that last one's different. Chess, or Go, or reasoning, they're all things a computer can do. If a computer can do it, though, clearly it doesn't require intelligence because intelligence is Doing Things Computers Can't Do.
Well you're adding a human to the equation at every step with AI.
Its not like AI are conscious on their own, the way lets say dogs can be.
Its not like AI are conscious on their own, the way lets say dogs can be.
Have you ever seen what happens to humans when left on their own in isolation? It’s not particularly evocative of intelligence.
What I meant by it is that AI is trained on human language, and requires humans to feed it information and electrical power, and currently need to interact with it. In its current state AI is tapping into human consciousness, so it can mimic it in some ways. Computer AI is not really a living entity, more like a self adjusting mathematical equation.
Just like computer game, if there's no one to play it, and a brain to process it, it doesn't really exist beyond 0's and 1s.
Dog's don't require humans at all to live, they would just revert back to their lives as wolves should humans disappeared.
Just like computer game, if there's no one to play it, and a brain to process it, it doesn't really exist beyond 0's and 1s.
Dog's don't require humans at all to live, they would just revert back to their lives as wolves should humans disappeared.
Have you ever interacted with a dog that has never been in contact with a human, or with other socialized dogs? Learning is a deeply social activity.
Are you distinguishing between intelligence and consciousness?
No, but then again, AI systems in the year 2023 have neither, and I do not expect to see that change in the years I have left.
I don't expect AI to be conscious in my lifetime. I think AI is already intelligent. Not all intelligence is conscious; not all consciousness is intelligent.
Are you defining consciousness?
> Over the last five years, a cluster of books has brought these ideas to public attention. In 2016, Peter Godfrey-Smith published Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, in which he argued that “evolution built minds twice over”, and octopuses’ invertebrate intelligence may shed light on what it means for us to be conscious, too.
> In 2019, Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, about eight people’s lives connected through their relationship with trees, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
> In 2020, word of mouth lifted Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, published seven years previously, into the New York Times bestseller list, for the vision it presented of mutual care and connection between people and plants.
> That year, Merlin Sheldrake published Entangled Life, another bestseller, exploring fungi and the “wood wide web” of their mycorrhizal collaboration with plants.
——-
And yet the tree, fungus or octopus who can write award winning literature has yet to be seen.
To confess my unpopular opinion: humanity is special.
> In 2019, Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, about eight people’s lives connected through their relationship with trees, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
> In 2020, word of mouth lifted Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, published seven years previously, into the New York Times bestseller list, for the vision it presented of mutual care and connection between people and plants.
> That year, Merlin Sheldrake published Entangled Life, another bestseller, exploring fungi and the “wood wide web” of their mycorrhizal collaboration with plants.
——-
And yet the tree, fungus or octopus who can write award winning literature has yet to be seen.
To confess my unpopular opinion: humanity is special.
The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers richly earned its Pulitzer. Highest possible recommendation.
I generally agree that humanity is special, or at least unique in its capabilities and desires.
But. We have no ideas what awards octopuses give each other, if any. Their failure to win Pulitzer prizes is no more damning than our failure to win octopus awards.
But. We have no ideas what awards octopuses give each other, if any. Their failure to win Pulitzer prizes is no more damning than our failure to win octopus awards.
> And yet the tree, fungus or octopus who can write award winning literature has yet to be seen.
Or the human that can sing a touching whalesong.
Or the human that can sing a touching whalesong.
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"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
This comment is exactly the sort of thing that site guideline asks you not to post here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This comment is exactly the sort of thing that site guideline asks you not to post here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Human intelligence is such a complicated topic and a problem is that people constantly mischaracterize it. Intelligence isn't one thing-- there are multiple types of intelligence that are not always discretely separated into different categories that you can compare like playing cards. A nomad would be considered stupid compared to you in classroom, but having to survive in nature you'd probably be the fool.
How do you compare the physical intelligence of an Olympic athlete with years of specialized science-driven training, to the physical intelligence of a man who trained to fight in war since childhood and who has battle experience? Just because one person can jump into a pool better, does not make them superior. Just because one person has more capability to defend their family does not make them superior.
When people try to make these judgements, they don't like being honest about how hard it is to compare the cognitive faculty of two different human beings. Often these discussions just end up with a lot of cultural relativism, a lot of people declaring what they're familiar with is more valuable. Ideally people would learn more about 'unknown unknowns'-- the things they didn't know that they don't know. In practice people get uncomfortable being told there are things they don't get that other cultures understand well.
How do you compare the physical intelligence of an Olympic athlete with years of specialized science-driven training, to the physical intelligence of a man who trained to fight in war since childhood and who has battle experience? Just because one person can jump into a pool better, does not make them superior. Just because one person has more capability to defend their family does not make them superior.
When people try to make these judgements, they don't like being honest about how hard it is to compare the cognitive faculty of two different human beings. Often these discussions just end up with a lot of cultural relativism, a lot of people declaring what they're familiar with is more valuable. Ideally people would learn more about 'unknown unknowns'-- the things they didn't know that they don't know. In practice people get uncomfortable being told there are things they don't get that other cultures understand well.
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Hey, I’m not sure where to post this, but I have to ask…
I noticed reading the FAQ that HN users can change their names now:
> Can I change my username?
> Yes. Email [email protected] and we'll help.
How on earth did you pull this off? Can you please allocate some time someday to talk about this on a technical level? It’s probably one of the more impressive refactorings I’ve ever seen.
HN was originally designed so that usernames were the primary key in HN’s database schema. They appear in dozens of places, and each of those places would need to be mutated by a username change. But that would be hard for obvious reasons — examining up to 37 million items and updating them atomically isn’t so easy, especially when there are external systems involved like Algolia and Firebase.
The only other way I can think of would be to create a second “shadow” user. E.g. if user foo wants to change their name to bar, then create bar and set it as the shadow of foo. But now everywhere in the code that looks up usernames needs to perform this indirection. Is that how it works? It would also have other benefits, e.g. if someone visits /user?id=foo then you can redirect them to bar. But there must be dozens of places where this indirection needs to happen, so I’m leaning towards the “update all 37 million items atomically” design rather than shadow users.
I suppose the third option is to punt: create bar, set bar’s karma to foo’s, change foo’s profile to “I switched to bar,” and lock foo. That’s entirely valid, and seems like the most likely approach for a name change. (It would certainly sidestep a mountain of complexity…)
As someone who’s studied the HN codebase for well over a decade, I have to know. It’ll torment me if it remains a mystery. Sorry for the off topic question.
I noticed reading the FAQ that HN users can change their names now:
> Can I change my username?
> Yes. Email [email protected] and we'll help.
How on earth did you pull this off? Can you please allocate some time someday to talk about this on a technical level? It’s probably one of the more impressive refactorings I’ve ever seen.
HN was originally designed so that usernames were the primary key in HN’s database schema. They appear in dozens of places, and each of those places would need to be mutated by a username change. But that would be hard for obvious reasons — examining up to 37 million items and updating them atomically isn’t so easy, especially when there are external systems involved like Algolia and Firebase.
The only other way I can think of would be to create a second “shadow” user. E.g. if user foo wants to change their name to bar, then create bar and set it as the shadow of foo. But now everywhere in the code that looks up usernames needs to perform this indirection. Is that how it works? It would also have other benefits, e.g. if someone visits /user?id=foo then you can redirect them to bar. But there must be dozens of places where this indirection needs to happen, so I’m leaning towards the “update all 37 million items atomically” design rather than shadow users.
I suppose the third option is to punt: create bar, set bar’s karma to foo’s, change foo’s profile to “I switched to bar,” and lock foo. That’s entirely valid, and seems like the most likely approach for a name change. (It would certainly sidestep a mountain of complexity…)
As someone who’s studied the HN codebase for well over a decade, I have to know. It’ll torment me if it remains a mystery. Sorry for the off topic question.
People have misused a multitude of facts to justify murder and enslavement. That doesn't mean we should delude ourselves about the facts. Ultimately we need a better moral framework to prevent atrocities and repression than censorship or denial of any fact that could conceivably be twisted by would-be tyrants into a plank in their edifice of justifications for tyranny.
Nobody wants to know that 90% of humanity is cognitively incapacitated, with another 7% impaired.
Because if you're in that 3% and you possess a reasonable amount of empathy, worrying about that 97% is just exhausting.
I worry more about the 3%.
Is there any basis to these figures?
Yes, but there's no use discussing it.
I agree that intelligence in a specific area is unevenly distributed. But I think that the word "intelligence" really only gains significance with the context that you're measuring it in.
Its controversial because people use it as a dog whistle for racial/ethnic ostracizing, when the capacity for nurture is distributed pretty equally
In the absence of a recognition of biological differences in cognitive potential and behavioral tendencies, every disparity in socioeconomic outcomes will be attributed to structural discrimination, leading to "corrective" policies, that are futile in fixing it, leading to policy makers resorting to ever more extreme/desperate measures, like:
* claiming mathematics is "white", and removing calculus from high school curricula
* eliminating standardized testing as the primary criteria for university admission so that the admissions staff can exercise their biases without being exposed.
* claiming mathematics is "white", and removing calculus from high school curricula
* eliminating standardized testing as the primary criteria for university admission so that the admissions staff can exercise their biases without being exposed.
From reading The Bell Curve, it seems that the idea was if it’s just environmental, we can some how “fix” it. The authors even said back then that it’s worse if it’s environmental, and probably easier to “fix” if it’s purely genetic.
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> After 250 years of humanity (well, some of humanity…) confidently atop the great pyramid of being, we in the west are becoming more aware that we might, perhaps, have company.
What a load of crap. Just because cephalopods exhibit behavioral traits that can be classified as intelligence if one defines "intelligence" in a suitable way, doesn't mean that cephalopod intelligence is in any way comparable to human intelligence.
Let me know when a giant squid writes a poem, or a honeybee colony develops a theory of thought. Until then, I'm going to flat out dismiss such statements as pseudoscience with some faux-spirituality sprinkled on top of it.
> "More-than-human doesn’t even begin to cover it,” Bridle writes in Ways of Being. “Not only are we the products of multiple entangled ancestors, spanning vast ranges of the evolutionary field; we are not even individuals at all.” [Emphasis added]
Case in point. Grand claims made without any justification matching their scope, and indeed without elaborating on what exactly those claims even mean. Concluding that individuality in a human sense doesn't exist because of biological endosymbionts is textbook "not even wrong" bollocks.
What a load of crap. Just because cephalopods exhibit behavioral traits that can be classified as intelligence if one defines "intelligence" in a suitable way, doesn't mean that cephalopod intelligence is in any way comparable to human intelligence.
Let me know when a giant squid writes a poem, or a honeybee colony develops a theory of thought. Until then, I'm going to flat out dismiss such statements as pseudoscience with some faux-spirituality sprinkled on top of it.
> "More-than-human doesn’t even begin to cover it,” Bridle writes in Ways of Being. “Not only are we the products of multiple entangled ancestors, spanning vast ranges of the evolutionary field; we are not even individuals at all.” [Emphasis added]
Case in point. Grand claims made without any justification matching their scope, and indeed without elaborating on what exactly those claims even mean. Concluding that individuality in a human sense doesn't exist because of biological endosymbionts is textbook "not even wrong" bollocks.
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> nature and technology are not in opposition
No, nature and the "new" man are in opposition. This is precisely why "AI" is seen as a threat in the modern world: because the people who wield it can't be trusted (by others).
This comes down to our philosophical roots: everyone in the world today, more or less, are Christian (or more broadly, Abrahamic) in thinking, with the unshaken belief of a body-restricted self aka "soul". The rigid rules of religion are required for this particular reason: selfish-ness in this understanding does indeed becomes a curse to society.
Classical(1) Indian (and perhaps Egypt-Greece) philosophies have long understood the limitations of this thinking and destruction (and strangely, also prosperity) it leads to. More than this, the 'ditya' thinking is very obviously wrong, in much the same way that economics' usage of homo-economicus is.
(1) "Classical" because most Indians (and Asians broadly) are epistemically closer to the West than to their ancestors. The West mostly uses Indian traditions superficially for the inflation of their already inflated egos.
No, nature and the "new" man are in opposition. This is precisely why "AI" is seen as a threat in the modern world: because the people who wield it can't be trusted (by others).
This comes down to our philosophical roots: everyone in the world today, more or less, are Christian (or more broadly, Abrahamic) in thinking, with the unshaken belief of a body-restricted self aka "soul". The rigid rules of religion are required for this particular reason: selfish-ness in this understanding does indeed becomes a curse to society.
Classical(1) Indian (and perhaps Egypt-Greece) philosophies have long understood the limitations of this thinking and destruction (and strangely, also prosperity) it leads to. More than this, the 'ditya' thinking is very obviously wrong, in much the same way that economics' usage of homo-economicus is.
(1) "Classical" because most Indians (and Asians broadly) are epistemically closer to the West than to their ancestors. The West mostly uses Indian traditions superficially for the inflation of their already inflated egos.
Any books you'd recommend on the topics you discussed?
At some point we'll create intelligence more advanced than our own, and hopefully it has the capacity to be able to recognize that we can still have meaning even though we might seem like the ones with an uncertain level of intelligence at that point. If we want to help ensure that is the case, we should start to ascribe some more meaning and sanctity to the other forms of life besides ourselves. That next thing is probably going to take after its creator, and if we have no regard for any life but our own, we shouldn't expect it to learn something differently from us.
The day to day experience of our lives is no less magical if human consciousness or life is not uniquely special, or even if the universe we exist in was entirely simulated. We experience it the same in any case.
We don't have to be a uniquely special case. It's not necessary for us to be in order for life to have meaning or be sacred.
So let's not dismiss the possibility of consciousness or sentience in any other potential life forms around us, natural or artificial. We need to try and err on the side of caution, and reevaluate often as we learn more. And let us agree together that all potential intelligence or sentience should be handled with as much care and respect as we can reasonably provide.