Surprised you didn’t mention DNA here, Eliezer. I imagine that if a truly alien species did a lifeform scan [cringe] of Earth, the first general comment they’d make would be along the lines of ‘hey, they’re all based on a double-helix self-replicator system’. Although not in English, of course.
So tell us—just how far back do we need to roll our intuitions here? If there’s no perfect, blank ghost-in-the-machine intelligence, what common factors would we expect the average evolved intelligence to have? Some sort of visual cortex? A ‘brain’ that began as an I/O hub but ‘evolved’ to be the seat of intelligence? A mix of ‘organic’ and ‘technological’ elements?
Surprised you didn’t mention DNA here, Eliezer. I imagine that if a truly alien species did a lifeform scan [cringe] of Earth, the first general comment they’d make would be along the lines of ‘hey, they’re all based on a double-helix self-replicator system’. Although not in English, of course.
So tell us—just how far back do we need to roll our intuitions here? If there’s no perfect, blank ghost-in-the-machine intelligence, what common factors would we expect the average evolved intelligence to have? Some sort of visual cortex? A ‘brain’ that began as an I/O hub but ‘evolved’ to be the seat of intelligence? A mix of ‘organic’ and ‘technological’ elements?