AGI? Transhumanist evolution?
Just randoomly ran across this bright young fellow He's posted a lot of work. Interesting, in light of my recent posts on AI stuff like the DeKai Wu Raising AI book and similar things.
Then I got onto this via a Substack post.
Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet)
To understand life, we must stop treating organisms like machines and minds like code.
Much of our current discussion about consciousness has a singular fatal flaw. It’s a mistake built into the very foundations of how we view science — and how science itself is perceived and conducted across disciplines, including today’s hype around artificial intelligence.
Great piece. Includes an AI audio narration, ~22 min).
Well worth your time. BTW: He had me at
Shannon Vallor.
Well, then that essay.led me here:
… Our scientific worldview has gotten stuck in an impossible contradiction, making our present crisis fundamentally a crisis of meaning. On the one hand, science appears to make human life seem ultimately insignificant. The grand narratives of cosmology and evolution present us as a tiny contingent accident in a vast indifferent universe. On the other hand, science repeatedly shows us that our human situation is inescapable when we search for objective truth because we cannot step outside our human form and attain a God’s-eye view of reality. Cosmology tells us that we can know the universe and its origin only from our inside position, not from the outside. We live within a causal bubble of information—the distance light traveled since the big bang—and we cannot know what lies outside. Quantum physics suggests that the nature of subatomic matter cannot be separated from our methods of questioning and investigating it. In biology, the origin and nature of life and sentience remain a mystery despite marvelous advances in genetics, molecular evolution, and developmental biology. Ultimately, we cannot forgo relying on our own experience of being alive when we seek to comprehend the phenomenon of life. Cognitive neuroscience drives the point home by indicating that we cannot fully fathom consciousness without experiencing it from within. Each of these fields ultimately runs aground on its own paradoxes of inner versus outer, and observer versus observed, that collectively turn on the conundrum of how to understand awareness and subjectivity in a universe that was supposed to be fully describable in objective scientific terms without reference to the mind. The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of things and that we’re central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand how this paradox arises and what it means, we’ll never be able to understand science as a human activity and we’ll keep defaulting to a view of nature as something to gain mastery over.
Each of the cases just mentioned—cosmology and the origin of the universe, quantum physics and the nature of matter, biology and the nature of life, cognitive neuroscience and the nature of consciousness—represents more than an individual scientific field. Collectively they represent our culture’s grand scientific narratives about the origin and structure of the universe and the nature of life and the mind. They underpin the ongoing project of a global scientific civilization. They constitute a modern form of mythos: they are the stories that orient us and structure our understanding of the world. For these reasons, the paradoxes these fields face are more than mere intellectual or theoretical puzzles. They signal the larger unreconciled perspectives of the knower and the known, mind and nature, subjectivity and objectivity, whose fracture menaces our project of civilization altogether. Our present-day technologies, which drive us ever closer to existential threats, concretize this split by treating everything—including, paradoxically, awareness and knowing themselves—as an objectifiable, informational quantity or resource. It’s precisely this split—the divorce between knower and known and the suppression of the knower in favor of the known—that constitutes our meaning crisis. The climate emergency, which arises from our treating nature as just a resource for our use, is the most pronounced and catastrophic manifestation of our crisis.
In short, although we have created the most powerful and successful form of objective knowledge of all time, we lack a comparable understanding of ourselves as knowers. We have the best maps we’ve ever made, but we’ve forgotten to take account of the map makers. Unless we change how we navigate, we’re bound to head deeper into peril and confusion.
Regrettably, the three best-known responses to the crisis of meaning in our scientific worldview are all dead ends.
First, scientific triumphalism doubles down on the absolute supremacy of science. It holds that no question or problem is beyond the reach of scientific discourse. It advertises itself as the direct heir of the Enlightenment. But it simplifies and distorts Enlightenment thinkers who were often skeptical about progress and who had subtle and sophisticated views about the limits of science. Triumphalism’s conception of science remains narrow and outmoded. It leans heavily on problematic versions of reductionism—the idea that complex phenomena can always be exhaustively explained in terms of simpler phenomena—and crude forms of realism—the idea that science provides a literally true account of how reality is in itself apart from our cognitive interactions with it. Its view of objectivity rests on an often unacknowledged metaphysics of a perfectly knowable, definite reality existing “out there,” independent of our minds and actions. It often denies the value of philosophy and holds that more of the same narrow and outmoded thinking will show us the way forward. As a result, theoretical models become ever more contrived and distant from empirical data, while experimental resources are applied to low-risk research projects that eschew more fundamental questions. Like Victorian-era spiritualism and pining for ghosts, scientific triumphalism looks backward to the fantasized spirit of a long-dead age and cannot hope to provide a path forward through the monumental challenges that science and civilization face in the twenty-first century.
Science denial on the right and so-called postmodernism on the left represent a second response. These movements reject science. They particularly reject its capacity to establish truths about the world that can be used as a basis for further knowledge and wise policies and actions. Worse still, they provide an opportunity for certain groups to manipulate how facts are interpreted for their own selfish and ideological ends, thereby spreading intentional disinformation in the form of so-called alternative facts and alternative truths. Although the motives of these two movements undeniably differ, both undermine the values of modern society on which they themselves depend, offering nothing but skepticism and negativism, or willful disinformation, in return.
Finally, the new age movement uses fringe science or pseudoscience to justify wishful thinking. Although this movement has had less impact than the other ones, it has muddied the waters for those of us who look for new perspectives on the scientific endeavor. Its uncritical embrace of various misrepresentations of Asian or Indigenous worldviews takes reductionistic science as the norm of all science, and thereby fails to understand the scientific ideas and practices of these other cultures. As a result, constructive dialogue with other cultural traditions about their epistemic practices becomes rare, if not impossible.
Given that these three responses fail to address the crisis of meaning in our scientific worldview, how can we find our way forward? First and foremost, we need to know where the crisis comes from. Our goal is to identify the source of the crisis, offer clues to a new path forward, and present a new perspective on some of the biggest issues science faces today. These issues include time and cosmology, quantum physics and its measurement problem, the nature of life and sentience, how the mind works and its relation to AI, the nature of consciousness, and, finally, climate change and Earth’s entry into the new human-shaped epoch called the Anthropocene. The range of topics touched by our new perspective is indeed broad, and the vista is equally expansive. We believe that our perspective can help transform and revive our cherished scientific culture as it faces its greatest challenges while reshaping our worldview for a sustainable project of civilization.
We call the source of the meaning crisis the Blind Spot. At the heart of science lies something we do not see that makes science possible, just as the blind spot lies at the heart of our visual field and makes seeing possible. In the visual blind spot sits the optic nerve; in the scientific blind spot sits direct experience—that by which anything appears, shows up, or becomes available to us. It is a precondition of observation, investigation, exploration, measurement, and justification. Things appear and become available thanks to our bodies and their feeling and perceiving capacities. Direct experience is bodily experience. “The body is the vehicle of being in the world,” says French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but as we will see, firsthand bodily experience lies hidden in the Blind Spot.
Frank, Adam; Gleiser, Marcelo; Thompson, Evan (2024). The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (Introduction). Kindle Edition.
So many smart people.
REGARDING EVOLUTION AND "TRANSHUMANISM."
... Intelligence begins with the
sensitivity of a single cell, and by a process of biological accumulation
and selection, transmitted genetically, reaches a current culmination in the
complexity of the human brain. In the same way, the first chipped flint, by a
process of cultural accumulation of knowledge passed on
verbally and subjected to the selection of experience, reaches a current
culmination in spacecraft, cyclotrons, and satellite-relayed television. At the
same time, the natural and necessary playfulness of the young mammalian as it
explores its environment and learns how to live in it, over time, and also by a
cultural process of imitation, memory, and the transmission of knowledge and
skills from generation to generation, reaches another apotheosis in the high
cultures and great arts.
For the comparatively weak creature who must cope with an environment and rise
to any situation or perish, the resources of mental equipment are applied first
to the most urgent exigencies. The earliest application of intelligence is
devoted to devising tools as weapons; those that follow aid the amenities of
life; finally, religion, philosophy, and the arts make their appearance.
The kind of tools that are made will depend on the material that happens to be
available, be it leaves, branches, stones, clay, or the presence or absence of
minerals. Thus an interaction exists between environment and creature that
affects the development of tools and culture as well as of senses and
intelligence.
In ancient Egypt, for example, the presence of the papyrus plant led to the
fabrication of ropes, mats, sandals, and eventually paper; the presence of flax
made possible the eventual perfecting of supremely fine linens. In Central
America the presence of lava led to cutting tools of obsidian. Once a cultural
habit becomes established, however, it remains impossible to predict either the
route it will follow or its ultimate outcome. Who could have foretold that the
sweet potato-washing habit established among the members of the famous Japanese
macaque colony, and the subsequent sifting of sand from grain in the sea, would
so accustom these forest animals to playing in the water that they would
eventually begin to swim? And in the face of this unlikely outcome of a
recently established behavior pattern, who would dare to predict to what the
new-found ability to swim might lead?
Yet strangely enough—or perhaps not so surprisingly, in view of the basic
uniformity of mankind's cerebral mechanisms—no matter where, geographically,
nor when, over the entire span of human history, local cultures have developed
into advanced civilizations, we find that mankind's greatest thoughts, as
epitomized in the writings of philosophers, show remarkable similarity. Some
views on the nature and value of knowledge, intellect, and intelligence
propounded by wise men of China, so distant from us in place and time, are
stunning in their modernity and still current validity.
In the misty beginnings of China's long cultural history, Lao-tze, expounding
his concept of Tao, the Way (of nature and of wise living), is reported to have
insisted that knowledge is not virtue and neither is it wisdom, for nothing is
so far from a sage as an "intellectual." The worst government would
be one of philosophers, he is said to have averred, for they botch every
natural process with theory; their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas
is precisely the sign of their incapacity for action!
At a later period the philosopher Chuang-tze, who lived about 370 B.C., showed
a sophistication of thinking that we find difficult to credit to those early
times. He wrote that problems are due less to the nature of things than to the
limits of our thought; that it is not to be wondered at that the effort of our
imprisoned brains to understand the cosmos of which they are such minute
particles should end in contradiction.
He spoke of the limits of intellect; the attempt to explain the
whole in terms of the part has been a gigantic immodesty, forgivable only on
the ground of the amusement it has caused, for humor, like philosophy, is a
view of the part in terms of the whole, and neither is possible without the
other. The intellect, said Chuang-tze, can never avail to understand ultimate
things, or any profound thing, such as the growth of a child. In order to
understand the Tao, one must "sternly suppress one's knowledge": we
have to suppress our theories and feel fact. Education is of no
help toward such understanding: submission in the flow of nature is
all-important.
And Wang Yang-ming, who lived from 1472 to 1528,
practically summarized our present thesis when he wrote: "The mind itself
is the embodiment of natural law. Is there anything in the universe that exists
independent of mind? Is there any law apart from the mind?"
Experts feel certain that the human brain has not undergone any significant
biological change since the time of the Neanderthals, who, as evidenced in the
excavations at the Shanidar caves high in the mountains of Kurdistan in
northern Iraq, built fires, cared for their sick, conducted funeral rites, and
put flowers with the bodies of their dead. In the last twenty to thirty
thousand years, we know from archaeological findings of both historic and
prehistoric periods, a high degree of intellectual accomplishment has been
uniformly present in all the branches of our species throughout its existence.
The brief excerpts we have given of ancient Chinese thought about thought would
certainly seem to bear out this opinion.
There is, however, an outcome of the cumulative nature of culture that we must
not overlook. Increasingly, as intelligence adapts a living creature to its
environment by the use of artifacts and through the cultural transmission of
knowledge, the creature and the environment modify each other at an exponential
rate. Perfect adaptation, of the order of the ants' or the termites', which has
existed in a balance between being and habitat unchanged over hundreds of
millions of years, is not possible for mankind. The rapidity of change in our cultural
habitat presents a perpetual and continuing stimulus to bodily and, above all,
to mental adaptation, which of necessity increases the demands on the new brain
to devise accommodation, and in the process speeds both the rate of change and
the need for new changes.
And so, although we recognize that we have been mistaken in thinking that the
technological advances of Western man might indicate new departures in the
human brain's capacities, yet we have also to recognize that that technology is
rapidly creating a totally new environment for our species.
This new environment may well ultimately affect our species' future
development; precisely this technology may prove to be the turning point
through which, in negotiating it, we may find ourselves in a process of
extinction as Homo sapiens and in a stage of transition toward Homo
neocorticus.
There are, of course, far too many imponderables involved to feel confident in
predicting the future course of our species. Among these are the course of
technology itself and how far from natural processes it can carry us before it
becomes subject to its own limitations. There is the matter of human population
density and whether it will be adjusted by natural means or can be adapted to
the biosphere that is our habitat by cultural or social means. There is the
question of the medical preservation of the "unfit" and whether we
can remain viable at all as a species with the increasing maladaptive dilution
of our gene pools. And there is the possibility that ecological interference
may ultimately make mankind's existence untenable.
Our evolutionary development may be reaching the end of a line for biological
if not for cultural reasons, but we ourselves are inclined to discount this. We
believe subtle biological factors to be operating that are not yet clearly
discernible, but which may be recognizable in retrospect. Another factor as
simple and probable as the advent of another ice age, for instance, would
effectively alter and reequilibrate the balance between man and nature, and
must also be kept in mind as a possibility.
We believe that the possibility and even the likelihood remain for a true
evolutionary progression in the anatomical and physiological configuration of
the brain, much like the progression that occurred between apes and man. In
that case the departure would be just as radical, and it would have as a
consequence new behavioral response patterns that at this point we cannot
visualize and about which we can only speculate.
To assume that this new superintelligence would occupy itself with creating a
new, weird, and wonderful technology is a naive exercise of human fantasy.
Ultimately technology exists to serve the greater comfort of individuals, and a
superintelligence may well find other means of achieving this end. Thus, were
such a superintelligence to be found in some other planetary system, we might
be confronted with something totally alien to our understanding, and even to
our imagination.
It seems to us that we can predict as a next development the extension of an
actual and currently observable trend. We see in mankind the persistence of a
brain function that has lost its original purpose. This function is seated in
the brain's so-called limbic system—the areas of the brain that govern our
emotions. This still active part of our brain mediates all those built-in and
semiautomatic responses that enhanced an ability to survive in our remote
animal past. It achieves those responses by setting up in the animal (and,
vestigially, in us) an emotional state that promotes the performance of the
necessary actions. It is an inherent property of animal behavior patterns that
they are coupled with governing emotions.
As human beings, we tend to regard our own emotions, coupled with our social
propensities, as a particularly high and noble facet of our behavior, and it
may well be that this is so, but we have to assume that an animal has far
more specific feelings and passions than are known by humans, since a
generalized "mood" must precede any action it takes. Konrad Lorenz
has quoted Heinroth as saying, "Animals are emotional people of low
intelligence," and he himself observed, "We should assume that the
realm of human feelings must exhibit a similar process of simplification and
abolition of differentiation to that known to have occurred in human instinctive
behavior."
The limbic area of our brain still regulates our emotions, and so it is, in
effect, the seat of our "humanity." Because of it we feel parental
and sexual feelings, know pleasure or distress, fear or anger, start at strange
sounds, dislike unfamiliar sights and smells, experience love and hate and the
entire complex of emotions of which human beings are capable. It is perfectly apparent
that the limbic system is still very much in operation, and yet we nevertheless
find equally apparent a growing tendency for the newest part of our brain, the
neocortex, to overtake and usurp many of its functions.
The neocortex is the seat of our reasoning abilities. It mediates our capacity
for judgment, for making decisions based on logical thought, for solving
problems, for evaluation and choice. In human beings there is an increasing
propensity for neocortical reason to impinge upon biologically older limbic
emotions in determining our ultimate behavior. Indeed, there is hardly an area
of human function that is not now, at least to some extent, subject to
neocortical control.
If we feel a surge of anger, we are able, if we will, to stay it and to
question whether it is a justifiable response. It goes so far that such basic
functions as sex and reproduction may be modified by our reason. Even as we
feel a biological attraction to an opposite-sex person, our reason is
questioning: Will he or she enjoy the things we enjoy? Will he fit into our
social scheme? Will she be as interesting a companion as she is good to look
at? Whether or not we follow up that initial attraction with invitation or
acceptance of further acquaintanceship is often determined by our answers to
those promptings of reason.
To dramatize and highlight the coexistence of the two conflicting bases of
contemporary human brain function, we have only to look at our scientific
community. On the one hand, those engaged in the so-called pure sciences, like
mathematics, physics, or astronomy, rigidly exclude emotional involvement and
stress logic in the conclusions they arrive at and in every aspect of their
work. On the other hand, practitioners of the psychological sciences,
especially those concerned with mental health, place inordinate importance on
"freeing" the emotions from the shackles of the reasoning mind, in
the belief that the reasoning mind is the culprit and chief cause of mankind's
maladjustments.
The dual and often conflicting mental motivations indeed reach as far as the
ultimate purpose to which our natural life is geared—the production,
sustaining, and rearing of a new generation, which today is also subjected to
the processes of reason. We ask ourselves such questions as how many children
we can afford to raise and, indeed, whether we wish to have children at all. No
longer do our emotions alone mediate even the continuity of our species.
Of course, in the vast diversity of human beings, there are many who still are
governed in their actions more by their emotions than by their reason; those
who are more neocortically controlled are still a minority among us. There is a
whole spectrum between these extremes, but no aspect of the old brain's
function except the purely autonomic is not to some extent influenced and in
the process of becoming dominated by the new.
The most likely next phase of intelligence in our own species, then, is toward
the total control of our emotions by the neocortex, that is,
by judgment, reason, and logic. Such a process would eventually eliminate
entirely such responses as love, hate, maternal feelings, anxiety, and also
many of the derivative mental consequences of those emotions, such as elation,
joy, enthusiasm, as well as depression, psychosomatic diseases, and so on. With
this development, should it materialize, everything that makes us what we are
would disappear and our descendants would appear to us to be feelingless
automatons. They, on the other hand, from their vantage point in time, would
look upon us as primitive forerunners of their species, much as we regard apes
and monkeys.
Naturally, in saying that the neocortex would eliminate our basic emotions,
this does not imply that all emotion would necessarily be expunged from the
repertoire of our posterity. The brain has pleasure centers, and these, if
denied the stimulus of the old emotions, would surely find new material in
purely neocortical responses. The brain's pleasure centers might then find new
function in elaborating such neocortical pleasures as aesthetic appreciation,
scientific research and theorizing, the special joys of puzzle solving, and
similar satisfactions of the judgmental and reasoning mind.
It could well be that when the neocortex finally takes over completely and is
instrumental in producing our hypothetical new species, they will be better
adapted to life than we—freed, as they would be, from mankind's unabating
internal dissonance between feelings and reason. The apes are admirably adapted
to the circumstances of their lives by the operation of their limbic system and
with but little demand upon the resources of the budding neocortex of which
they are possessed; this future race will equally experience the benefits of
having only one dominant cerebral function—in their case, the reasoning
neocortex. The whole course of human history may prove to have been but a
comparatively short stage of shifting between these two states of balance.
All other species have no option but to be at ease in the niche of life in
which they find themselves: the ape does not question its reason for being or
its destiny—it simply lives—and the future race will be unlikely to experience
such mixed feelings as we know. In the final count, Homo sapiens may be
distinguished not for "brain" and "culture," but as the
creature that knew dissatisfaction, that lived in "divine
discontent," precisely because, in our line, the emerging neocortex has
reached in us a stage where it challenges and to some extent controls the old
brain, but does not yet have the field to itself. We are in our minds and in
our whole being basically dual, and this, beyond any of our technical achievements,
is the mark of Homo sapiens.
Whether such a line of development as this occurs in other parts of the
universe, where higher intelligences have evolved, is open to speculation. It
could be that it is a development that is idiosyncratic to ourselves, but we
are not inclined to postulate unique phenomena, and we think it more likely
that a stage similar to ours is inevitable in the development of any very high
intelligence anywhere. Transitional phases are unavoidable in any line of
evolution, and so we believe we should expect to find stages like ours wherever
higher life forms and intelligences emerge.
Any transitional stage, of its nature, is not very stable and record does not
provide extensive evidence of linking forms. Hence, the long search for the
transitional forms—the so-called missing link—that bridged the gap between the
apes and ourselves, a gap that is only now being filled in by very recent
discoveries in Africa of the australopithecines and other linking forms.
If, however, we look back at the whole line of primate development less
anthropocentrically, we or our descendants may yet find that the
australopithecines were a comparatively stable form when compared with us, Homo
sapiens. The future may well reveal that we, along with Neanderthal, Cromagnon,
and other comparatively recent forerunners, were each and all of us "trial
runs" in nature's progress toward a more stable form to house high
intelligence. The very fact that we find in ourselves competing mental systems
within one brain should alert us to the probability that we ourselves are a
kind of "missing link" between the apes and an eventual, more
harmoniously adapted Homo neocorticus.
This, of course, poses tremendous problems in planning to establish
interplanetary communications. Perhaps it is only in the transitional and
transitory stage peculiar to our species —and at that, only for a short phase
in the course of its development—that any feeling of need exists at all to
reach out and explore. It is a propensity that has marked our progress. Where
other creatures have found circumscribed habitats and have adapted to them,
mankind has found challenge in new horizons and constantly searched to find
them, whether in papyrus-reed craft, balsa-wood rafts, sailing boats,
airplanes, or interplanetary rockets.
Now that we begin to understand the vastness of the universe, we feel lonely
and isolated on our speck of a planet in one far corner of it. But for
interplanetary communication to eventuate, we probably have to seek the long
odds that another world has produced another species that reaches our own stage
at about the same time as we, or rather at the time that would allow for the
journey's distance to reach them. It is not impossible—indeed, it is
probable—that in the vastness of the universe such worlds exist.
And where do we go from here? What kind of brain will
supersede ours?
The superbrain of Homo neocorticus, as we have said, need not be markedly
larger than ours in order to produce a mind of a completely other quality. It
must, however, be somewhat bigger, both in the number of its neurons and in the
axon and dendrite connections between them—and therefore to a certain extent in
absolute mass—to achieve that change.
From the ready-made laboratory we have available on earth, we can see in the
progression from an apelike brain to the human one, first, a fuller use of the
potentialities of the smaller brain. The australopithecines—the so-called
man-apes—for example, retained brain dimensions no greater than those of modern
apes, yet they fabricated primitive tools and took the first steps toward a
human way of life over long ages, before environmental circumstances put a
premium on still greater intelligence. Only then did larger-brained species
emerge. Among ourselves, in our own species, we are aware of a notable
difference in brain performance all the way from the dull, to the average, to
the very bright, and up to the genius, while all these brains are objectively
of the same dimensions and potentially all capable of performance equal to that
of the genius.
It may be illuminating to look at another organ, or organ system, rather than
at the brain, to realize how far one can go in utilizing what already exists
before it becomes necessary to increase size for additional performance. The
muscles of a 90-pound weakling, for instance, are physically no different at
birth from those of a 200-pound weight lifter, and they have the same potential
for development. The eventual difference lies in the fact that the weight
lifter has exploited his muscle power to its fullest possibilities, while the
weakling has failed to do so.
In this respect, the brain is no different from any other organ. Its constant
use and exercise fosters better performance at a progressive rate. And so we
must visualize circumstances in which the demands made upon human brainpower
are such as to foster the full use of the tissue already at our disposal—in
fact, a time when what we now think of as "very bright" or
"genius" performance becomes "average"—before we have to
contemplate any increase in size to facilitate greater powers. If we can
imagine a society in which what we now think of as genius becomes
dull-to-normal intellectual performance, and try to visualize the geniuses of
that society, we then catch a glimpse of the first step toward Homo
neocorticus.
We can also get a second glimpse of that distant creature in our contemporary
earth-laboratory through another of the existing trends we have mentioned: that
the area of increased development and growth of brain will
surely continue the present tendency of the expansion of neocortical function
at the expense of the limbic system. After all, what is our present image of a
"civilized" person as opposed to a "wild" one? It is of a
person who has control of his emotions, one who exercises reason
and judgment, and who does not get "carried away" by personal
passions. Again, if we can visualize a society in which the behavior of the
most highly "civilized" of us has become the norm and in which a new,
far more highly civilized elect has begun to make an appearance, we may then
fill in a second color in our picture of the future of intelligence.
We may project that the brain stem—that part of our cerebral accoutrement that
governs the autonomic functions of the body (such as breathing, circulation,
and digestion)—may well take over some of the currently more primitive response
patterns of the limbic region, while the neocortex absorbs its higher
"emotional" functions. Thus, Homo neocorticus would arrive at a truly
dominant neocortex—a condition that is now only partly the case, but that may
be seen as en route in Homo sapiens.
Given such a brain, let us take a closer look at it. Its enormous capacity to
integrate information must eventually make our conventional languages almost
obsolete. Our words and sentence structure would become too cumbersome to
express the increased speed of the flow of thoughts and too imprecise to frame
the increased refinement of perception.
We do not think that language of our present type would ever become totally
obsolete, because we believe it to be a strong element in mother-child
attachment and bonding, and therefore a stage through which the future infant
would have to pass, but we do foresee it becoming less useful as that child
gets older. We can imagine scientists of the future studying their infants'
language as a clue to their understanding of the psychological processes of
their distant predecessors, much as we study embryology to confirm our ideas
about anatomical evolution.
We imagine that in that future time, adult communication will be effected by a
new type of "language," one much more condensed than ours, and also
more precise—perhaps something along the lines of our present mathematical
symbolism, extended and made more versatile. After all, our present brain—that
is, the brain of Homo sapiens—evolved to meet the needs of our species over the
ages before the time of written language. One of its especially important
functions in our development was its ability to "package" knowledge
in a form that could be stored, and thus enable our forerunners to pass on the
experience of their lifetimes to each rising generation. Today, the sheer
quantity of information available to us has become so vast that it is quite
impossible for any single mind to encompass all of it in the space of a
lifetime, either in its extent or in its precision. We imagine that the Homo
neocorticus brain will be able to do this.
This means that their increased brain capacity will be put to work encompassing
a body of knowledge that increases geometrically within each
generation. This will probably not be achieved by the addition of larger
storage capacity, for huge increases in storage capacity must eventually become
cumbersome and in any case limited by physical factors. Rather, we think, it
will be made possible by an increase in the ability to digest far larger
quantities of data simultaneously and to deduce solutions in an instant.
We now have to commit large bodies of information to memory to see their
connections and to match them with experience in order to utilize them
appropriately, whether in conversation or in social endeavor. Homo neocorticus,
on the other hand, will probably be able to rediscover over
and over again, without effort, all that the combined efforts of countless
scientific minds of our type have cumulatively been able to produce over
lifetimes. They will not have to learn and commit to memory, say, a theory of
relativity, but would see the principle clearly and immediately, and have the
means to be able to express it, any and every time it might be needed. In fact,
the concept would be as self-evident to them as the fact that a rose is a rose
is to us.
All these things we can see to some extent from the ways in which our own
brains are tending. But even in this we must be cautious. Apes, for instance,
when they are tested in laboratories, show a great reserve of intelligence and
ability that they are never called upon to exploit in their natural habitats.
They have also shown remarkable adaptability when experimentally transferred by
scientists to other natural habitats greatly different from their own.
In one such experiment, observers removed five chimpanzees to a desolate island
in a lake in the northwest of Russia—an area that they described as a
"cool jungle." Although night temperatures there often dropped as low
as 10 degrees above freezing, the observers reported they adapted so well that
"they might as well have been back home in Africa." They made cozy
shelters out of branches resembling armchairs and hammocks, reported Leonid
Firsov, director of the anthropoid center of the Academy of Sciences of USSR,
I. P. Pavlov Institute of Physiology in Leningrad. The temperature of their
"beds," warmed by their bodies, reached about 97° F. They found half
of the 180 varieties of plants edible, and they dined on leaves, seeds,
mushrooms, ants, and dragonflies. Even more fascinating, experiments showed
that the chimpanzees skillfully used sticks, branches, and stones as working
implements, and that they had a rich memory of association.
An ape could never know which of its own potentialities would prove useful and
become exponentially developed in a higher form. Similarly, we ourselves can
hardly know what circumstances will bring a more powerful new brain into being,
nor what purposes it will eventually serve. We can only be aware of the
enormous reserve capacity that resides in us, and speculate about its
direction.
We take it as an axiom that an organ seldom develops, and never persists,
unless a function is or becomes apparent for which it can be used. At that
point we know that an organ will take on any function that it can perform, and
that its use will improve its performance. Indeed, this reserve power that
seems to lie dormant in some species until environment provokes its potential into
actual use, has been called by anthropologists preadaptation. In
the primate line, it was the dormant potential of the simian brain that
permitted the evolution of the human.
Nevertheless, since we like to speculate, we may fairly entertain the thought
that perhaps some of the extreme intellectual feats that are now being
accomplished by humans may in turn reach their apotheosis in a descendant
species. What seems to us now to be a comparatively useless predilection for,
say, philosophy, or for so-called pure science, may eventually turn out for
them to be the basis of an entirely new way of life, and in that context they may
well think of it as a preadaptation. Thus, a genius of today may turn out to be
an advance guard, or the embodiment of a preadaptation that is even now paving
the way to future Homo neocorticus. Among that future species, what we now
consider as the highest, and even unnecessary, levels of mental activity will
be commonplace.
In this context it is not without interest that in our time, too, there is a
cultural practice that certainly must have an effect of reinforcing by sexual
selection the trends that we discern as being brought about by natural
selection. The practice is unicontinue their general education through school
and on into universities, advanced technical training centers, and other
institutions of higher learning.
In these places those of our young people who have shown superior mental
abilities are brought together and segregated for several years just at that
period of their lives when they are physically and emotionally ready for
breeding, so that the natural outcome of this social practice is to foster
mating between individuals who to a certain extent have been preselected for
their intelligence. Over comparatively few generations this inbreeding of our
more gifted young people must have some effect on the mental abilities shown in
the succeeding generations of their offspring. Thus, two powerful forces,
natural selection (by which the more adaptively endowed survive in greater
proportion whenever competition between breeding groups arises) and sexual
selection (by which males and females in their choice of mates tend thereby to
fix in the opposite sex those traits that they find desirable and attractive),
in our species and in our time, give indications of being mutually reinforcing.
Is this as far as we can extrapolate from what we know of Laboratory Earth in
our attempts to see into our own future or into other worlds?
Actually, it is not. It is within the realm of our reason and imagination to
catch glimpses of still more distant possible descendants.
We see that in nature successful solutions often arise by what is called convergence—that
is, they arise independently in different lines that are often separated in
time and place and are in no way related to each other, because these lines
have encountered similar environmental problems and have coped with them in a
similar way precisely because that solution is an efficient one. Prehensile
tails, for example, have developed in many kinds of monkey (although not in
all), in the common opposum, and in several related species, in the true
chameleon and a few lesser genera, and in a fish, the sea horse. Similar needs
in these disparate creatures have evoked a similar response in the structure
and function of the tail.
In earlier pages we have from time to time described what amounts to a group
brain as it exists among earth's social insects, which produces intelligent
solutions, although the individuals comprising the groups are separately only
capable of comparatively stereotyped actions. What if a group brain were to
evolve where all the individuals were possessed of the kind of superbrain and
superintelligence we are attributing to Homo neocorticus?
Utilizing the concept of convergence, we see that the social insects, by the
use of chemical substances—the pheromones—that give off distinctive odors, have
achieved almost instant communication, an important element in their
cooperative actions. In a mass brain of cooperative superbrains that might
evolve from Homo neocorticus, we could imagine an absolutely new type of
communication emerging, no longer either verbal or even more refinedly
symbolical. It could be a direct brain-to-brain awareness promoted by an individual
brain's electric charges that might be intensified or modified so as to
constitute an instant transmission without any kind of language, receptor
mechanisms being evolved within the brain itself.
In order to conceptualize this thought, we paid a visit to a modern laboratory
where electroencephalograms of patients being tested for brain disturbances are
being recorded and processed all day long. We saw there a technician in her
middle years who had spent all her working life recording and interpreting the
"squiggles" registered by inked points onto long rolls of papers as
they responded finely to the electric emanations of the patients' brains. The
lengths of paper were subsequently folded into bound volumes.
This technician could open any of those records and read them, understanding
all they implied, as easily as we read any page printed in our own language,
and she was teaching her young assistants to do the same. In other words, the
direct electric emanations from half a dozen different areas of the patient's
brain simultaneously, with their respective periods of excitement and calm, had
clear meaning for her, and she could read like a book any of the volumes in the
large library of records of brain activity that were assembled on the shelves
of her office.
If we can imagine these inked lines of the EEC squiggles as an extremely
primitive and crude form of what might ultimately evolve as a form of direct
brain-to-brain communication, we believe we have a plausible model on which to
base our speculations about our descendant species-after-next. Such
instantaneous communication could easily suffuse an entire group and make
possible intelligent mass action of an order that we can no longer imagine, or
even speculate about.
The question that remains is: Why such a brain? What possible environmental
circumstance could ever evoke it?
And the answer is that once a higher intelligence appears on the natural scene,
it makes its own environment. It is a matter of common observation among
ourselves that every human being leaves a mark of his or her own personality
upon surroundings. A housewife's individuality can almost be read by the
condition in which we find her house—the order or disorder in which it is kept,
the way it is furnished and decorated, the implements and equipment she uses. A
man's fields or garden, office or workshop or den, also reveal much about him.
It would seem that something of the brain and perhaps of the whole nervous
system of each of us is displayed in the environments we make for ourselves.
Even the little bowerbird reveals his individuality in the small objects he
uses to decorate his bower and in his arrangement of them. And so we feel we
are justified in assuming that as a brain evolves in complexity, it will surely
be to the accompaniment of an increasingly complex ambience.
Human beings originally lived in the same "nature" as all other
animals, and many still live very closely with it. If we camp in a forest, we
do not actually need our superior mental equipment—that other creatures live
out their lives in that forest is evidence of this. But most of us no longer
live in natural settings, and even those who do, modify them with such
artifacts as fire, weapons, and tools.
Today, all of mankind, some to a smaller but most to a larger extent, make our
own habitats, and our man-made environment becomes more and more complex.
Moreover, in the process of adjusting to our increasingly artificial
surroundings, we become less and less fitted to live in natural ones, and so
the course upon which we are embarked is far more likely to continue than to be
reversed. For Homo neocorticus we can project a habitat of, to us, incredible
complexity, and we can imagine that this will provide the spur that could
eventually produce the Group-brained neocorticus, whom we could no longer
designate as Homo.
At this point we pass our project over to our reader to use his or her
imagination to visualize a meeting between Homo sapiens and Group-brained
neocorticus, or its prototype as it may exist somewhere in the vastness of the
universe.
That is excerpted from "Beyond Human Intelligence" Chapter 11, Other Senses, Other Worlds, 1976. Doris & David Jonas. It has been out of print since 1989 when the publisher went bankrupt and closed its doors. I read it in 1976 via a “new nonfiction book release” copy from my local library (and I have subsequently acquired a hardbound copy). It has aged quite well topically.
BACK TO THE BLIND SPOT
From The Afterword
