No, that’s not at all obvious. We have absolutely no idea how hard it is to evolve intelligent life capable of creating recursive self-improving machine intelligence. I named a number of transitions in my post which may in fact have been much, much more difficult than we are giving credit. The first two probably aren’t, given what I know about astrobiology. Life is probably common, and multicellular life arose independently on Earth at least 46 times, so there’s probably not something difficult there that we’re missing. I don’t know anything about the evolutionary origins of neurons, so I won’t speculate there.
The evolution of human-level intelligence, however, in a species capable of making and using tools really does seem to have been a freak accident. It happened on Earth only because a tribe of social primates got stuck for thousands of years under favorable but isolated living conditions due to ecological barriers, and vicious tribal politics drove run-away expansion of the cerebral cortex. The number of things which had to go just right to make that occur as it actualy happened makes it a very unlikely event.
Let me rephrase what I just said: there are pressures at work which cause evolution to actually select against higher intelligence. It is only because of an ecological freak accident that isolated a tribe of tool-making social primates in a series of caves on a sea cliff on the coast of Africa for >50,000 years where they were allowed to live in relative comfort making the prime selection pressure mastery of tribal politics, which led to expansion of the general intelligence capability of the cerebral cortex, which gave us modern humans. There are so many factors which had to go just right there that I’d say that is a very likely candidate for a great filter.
But it’s all a moot point. We would expect a post-singularity expansionist intelligence to spread throughout the universe at close to the speed of light. Why don’t we see other intelligences? Because if they were in our past history light cone, then they would have already consumed Earth and we wouldn’t be here to ask the question. We should expect to see an empty sky, no matter how likely or unlikely intelligent life is.
If the question is “why is the universe old, when if we picked a random possible civilization it would more likely be an earlier one?” Well the assumption there is wrong. We don’t get to inject our priors onto the universe. Maybe we are one of the very uncommon late civilizations that just happened to be very far away from any of the other super intelligences, sparing us (for now). You say that is unlikely, but you are basing your calculations of probability on a self-selected prior. Who knows why we exist so late. We just do. We don’t get to extract information from that observation because we don’t know the universe’s priors.
We don’t get to inject our priors onto the universe.
It is my understanding that if we have priors we absolutely must inject them onto the universe to formulate the best possible mental map of it.
Who knows why we exist so late. We just do. We don’t get to extract information from that observation because we don’t know the universe’s priors.
But we do have lots of information about this. For example, the reason is not that earth is the only planet in our galaxy. And we have the potential of gaining lots more information such as if we find extraterrestrial life. I’m sure you don’t mean to imply that if we do not have a complete understanding of a phenomenon we must ignore that phenomenon when formulating beliefs.
What I mean is that you are injecting assumptions about how you came to be a conscious entity on Earth in whatever year your mother conceived you, as opposed to any other place or time in the history of the universe.
Maybe it’s true that for every sentient being you assign equal probability and then it would look very odd indeed that you ended up in a early stage civilization in an old, empty universe.
Or, maybe coherent worlds count as a single state, therefore greater probability mass is given to later civilizations which exist in a good deal many more Everett branches.
Or more likely it is something completely different. The very idea that I was ‘born into’ a sentient being chosen at random stinks of Cartesian dualism when I really look at it. It seems very unlikely to me that the underlying mechanism of the universe is describable at that scale.
No, that’s not at all obvious. We have absolutely no idea how hard it is to evolve intelligent life capable of creating recursive self-improving machine intelligence. I named a number of transitions in my post which may in fact have been much, much more difficult than we are giving credit. The first two probably aren’t, given what I know about astrobiology. Life is probably common, and multicellular life arose independently on Earth at least 46 times, so there’s probably not something difficult there that we’re missing. I don’t know anything about the evolutionary origins of neurons, so I won’t speculate there.
The evolution of human-level intelligence, however, in a species capable of making and using tools really does seem to have been a freak accident. It happened on Earth only because a tribe of social primates got stuck for thousands of years under favorable but isolated living conditions due to ecological barriers, and vicious tribal politics drove run-away expansion of the cerebral cortex. The number of things which had to go just right to make that occur as it actualy happened makes it a very unlikely event.
Let me rephrase what I just said: there are pressures at work which cause evolution to actually select against higher intelligence. It is only because of an ecological freak accident that isolated a tribe of tool-making social primates in a series of caves on a sea cliff on the coast of Africa for >50,000 years where they were allowed to live in relative comfort making the prime selection pressure mastery of tribal politics, which led to expansion of the general intelligence capability of the cerebral cortex, which gave us modern humans. There are so many factors which had to go just right there that I’d say that is a very likely candidate for a great filter.
But it’s all a moot point. We would expect a post-singularity expansionist intelligence to spread throughout the universe at close to the speed of light. Why don’t we see other intelligences? Because if they were in our past history light cone, then they would have already consumed Earth and we wouldn’t be here to ask the question. We should expect to see an empty sky, no matter how likely or unlikely intelligent life is.
If the question is “why is the universe old, when if we picked a random possible civilization it would more likely be an earlier one?” Well the assumption there is wrong. We don’t get to inject our priors onto the universe. Maybe we are one of the very uncommon late civilizations that just happened to be very far away from any of the other super intelligences, sparing us (for now). You say that is unlikely, but you are basing your calculations of probability on a self-selected prior. Who knows why we exist so late. We just do. We don’t get to extract information from that observation because we don’t know the universe’s priors.
It is my understanding that if we have priors we absolutely must inject them onto the universe to formulate the best possible mental map of it.
But we do have lots of information about this. For example, the reason is not that earth is the only planet in our galaxy. And we have the potential of gaining lots more information such as if we find extraterrestrial life. I’m sure you don’t mean to imply that if we do not have a complete understanding of a phenomenon we must ignore that phenomenon when formulating beliefs.
What I mean is that you are injecting assumptions about how you came to be a conscious entity on Earth in whatever year your mother conceived you, as opposed to any other place or time in the history of the universe.
Maybe it’s true that for every sentient being you assign equal probability and then it would look very odd indeed that you ended up in a early stage civilization in an old, empty universe.
Or, maybe coherent worlds count as a single state, therefore greater probability mass is given to later civilizations which exist in a good deal many more Everett branches.
Or more likely it is something completely different. The very idea that I was ‘born into’ a sentient being chosen at random stinks of Cartesian dualism when I really look at it. It seems very unlikely to me that the underlying mechanism of the universe is describable at that scale.