Ask HN: How much of human intelligence is cultural inheritance?
If a human baby somehow grew up to adulthood on a deserted planet, with lush, vegetation and rainforest, and was somehow protected as a baby by species of orangutan like primates, and at some point left that tribe to fend for itself how intelligent would that human become? Would it have the same level of intelligence as a human that grows up in our civilization, surrounded by our culture people language technology or would it be not as intelligent in a raw sense unrelated to language ?
11 comments
Yes I suspect most of our intelligence and know-how is actually accumulated in culture, media and tools.
I read somewhere that natural selection and evolution happens very slowly over million of years so essentially current day Homo Sapiens would likely behave like cavemens.
In District 9 most of the members of alien species stranded on earth without the overall technological structure of the ship regress to lower behaviours https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyLUwOcR5pk
Sometimes I wonder if we built a too interconnected society dependent on some certain tools and those tools collapse, can we rebuild stuff from scratch? For example it seems all services are more and more dependent on the Internet and electricity. Could it be that in 200 years everything is dependent on the internet/electricity to function and once it breaks down we have lost all the intermediate tools and know-how that brought us there and we revert to technology of 4000 years ago?
Right now this is unlikely, every single HomeDepot or hardware store contains thousands of tools like drills, saws nailguns that would help us quickly rebuild a collapsed world.
I read somewhere that natural selection and evolution happens very slowly over million of years so essentially current day Homo Sapiens would likely behave like cavemens.
In District 9 most of the members of alien species stranded on earth without the overall technological structure of the ship regress to lower behaviours https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyLUwOcR5pk
Sometimes I wonder if we built a too interconnected society dependent on some certain tools and those tools collapse, can we rebuild stuff from scratch? For example it seems all services are more and more dependent on the Internet and electricity. Could it be that in 200 years everything is dependent on the internet/electricity to function and once it breaks down we have lost all the intermediate tools and know-how that brought us there and we revert to technology of 4000 years ago?
Right now this is unlikely, every single HomeDepot or hardware store contains thousands of tools like drills, saws nailguns that would help us quickly rebuild a collapsed world.
There are some cases of human children that, either by neglect or some unfortunate freak accident, end up being in the company of wild animals from a very young age. In some of those cases, the child was never able to adapt once it had been rescued.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
Yeah, this is quite fascinating and formed my opinion on childhood education. I always just assumed you could learn language later in life, but apparently it's impossible. So there's some crazy advantage early education has, but it's not yet clear what it is.
It could also be those children raised in the company of animals view humans ('socialized' humans and human society) as uncivilized, brutish and stupid, and do not deign to learn the preoccupations of such savages.
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Well I can't program and puzzle solve without Googling, so I'm hyper-media dependent if that answers your question. Burdensome tasks have been offloaded to LLMs, search engines, note-taking tools, and bookmarking services. I think I'm an externalist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalism
If you know a bit about AI you may know that learning algorithms generally have variable learning rates. Typically learning rates are high to begin with then slowly drop as the algorithm progresses.
The reason for this is that early in the learning process you want find answers that are approximately correctly quickly so later you can refine and perfect them.
This high -> low learning rate strikes a balance between the importance of finding answers quickly vs spending time to perfect an answer.
If you keep the learning rate high the learning algorithm will be unfocused and constantly consider new potential answers. If it's kept too low it will waste time perfecting answers that are completely wrong.
Humans seem to do something similar. Children (especially new borns) learn extremely rapidly. Then as we age we tend to learn slower and mostly just refine existing views. Generally people don't change radically past their teenage years and by our early teens years we typically have a good sense for who we are and what we might become.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that it's extremely important that people are exposed to things like language and maths from an early age otherwise it becomes difficult to ever master them.
For example if you don't play a musical instrument as kid although you might be able to learn later in life you're unlikely to ever become a great musician.
Of course individual also have some varying amount of hard-wired intellectual capability – some people have genetic learning disabilities, others seem to be uniquely gifted in their ability to learn.
I think the answer to your question is difficult to answer because it largely depends on what you mean by intelligence. This hypothetical individual you describe would probably score extremely poorly on any traditional IQ test and would never fully grasp language.
However, there's not reason to think they wouldn't be very capable in other ways. They may have very good hand-eye coordination. They may be very good at communicating with orangutans. They may have an instinctive understanding of the rainforest and environment they grew up in. Whether you class that as intelligence is really up to you.
That said, in my opinion intelligence is can typically be defined as cognitive tasks that humanity collective deem important. So if you take a more traditional definition then no, this individual wouldn't be considered intelligent because they probably wouldn't be good at language, math and logic puzzles.
The reason for this is that early in the learning process you want find answers that are approximately correctly quickly so later you can refine and perfect them.
This high -> low learning rate strikes a balance between the importance of finding answers quickly vs spending time to perfect an answer.
If you keep the learning rate high the learning algorithm will be unfocused and constantly consider new potential answers. If it's kept too low it will waste time perfecting answers that are completely wrong.
Humans seem to do something similar. Children (especially new borns) learn extremely rapidly. Then as we age we tend to learn slower and mostly just refine existing views. Generally people don't change radically past their teenage years and by our early teens years we typically have a good sense for who we are and what we might become.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that it's extremely important that people are exposed to things like language and maths from an early age otherwise it becomes difficult to ever master them.
For example if you don't play a musical instrument as kid although you might be able to learn later in life you're unlikely to ever become a great musician.
Of course individual also have some varying amount of hard-wired intellectual capability – some people have genetic learning disabilities, others seem to be uniquely gifted in their ability to learn.
I think the answer to your question is difficult to answer because it largely depends on what you mean by intelligence. This hypothetical individual you describe would probably score extremely poorly on any traditional IQ test and would never fully grasp language.
However, there's not reason to think they wouldn't be very capable in other ways. They may have very good hand-eye coordination. They may be very good at communicating with orangutans. They may have an instinctive understanding of the rainforest and environment they grew up in. Whether you class that as intelligence is really up to you.
That said, in my opinion intelligence is can typically be defined as cognitive tasks that humanity collective deem important. So if you take a more traditional definition then no, this individual wouldn't be considered intelligent because they probably wouldn't be good at language, math and logic puzzles.
Depends on if you look at intelligence as what you have been taught versus the potential to learn anything. They would have the same potential to learn anything given enough exposure.
I think cases of feral/brutally neglected children that grew up without socialization show that IQ development is heavily determined by socialization.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity took a ridiculously long time to develop in pre-lingual humans, so it seems like language is a force multiplier for the brain's capacity to do stuff.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity took a ridiculously long time to develop in pre-lingual humans, so it seems like language is a force multiplier for the brain's capacity to do stuff.