Very interesting write-up! When you say that orcas could be more intelligent than humans, do you mean something similar to them having a higher IQ or g factor? I think this is quite plausible.
My thinking has been very much influenced by Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success, which you mentioned. For example, looking at the behavior of feral (human) children, it seems quite obvious to me now that all the things that humans can do better than other animals are all things that humans imitate from an existing cultural “reservoir” so to speak and that an individual human has virtually no hope of inventing within their lifetime, such as language, music, engineering principles, etc.
Gene-culture coevolution has resulted in a human culture and a human body that are adapted to each other. For example, the human digestive system is quite short because we’ve been cooking food for a long time, humans have muscles that are very weak compared to those of our evolutionary cousins because we’ve learned to make do with tools (weapons) instead and we have relatively protracted childhoods to absorb all of the culture required to survive and reproduce. If we tried to “uplift” orcas, the fact that human culture has co-evolved with the human body and not with the orca body would likely be an issue in trying to get them to learn it (a bit like trying to get software built for x86 to run on an ARM processor). Still, I think progress in LLM scaling shows that neural networks (artificial or biological) are able to absorb a significant chunk of human culture, as long as you have the right training method. I’ve made a similar point here.
There is nothing in principle that stops a chimpanzee from being able to read and write English, for example. It’s just that we haven’t figured out the methods to configure their brains into that state, because they don’t have a strong tendency to imitate, which human children do have, which makes training them much easier.
Very interesting write-up! When you say that orcas could be more intelligent than humans, do you mean something similar to them having a higher IQ or g factor? I think this is quite plausible.
My thinking has been very much influenced by Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success, which you mentioned. For example, looking at the behavior of feral (human) children, it seems quite obvious to me now that all the things that humans can do better than other animals are all things that humans imitate from an existing cultural “reservoir” so to speak and that an individual human has virtually no hope of inventing within their lifetime, such as language, music, engineering principles, etc.
Gene-culture coevolution has resulted in a human culture and a human body that are adapted to each other. For example, the human digestive system is quite short because we’ve been cooking food for a long time, humans have muscles that are very weak compared to those of our evolutionary cousins because we’ve learned to make do with tools (weapons) instead and we have relatively protracted childhoods to absorb all of the culture required to survive and reproduce. If we tried to “uplift” orcas, the fact that human culture has co-evolved with the human body and not with the orca body would likely be an issue in trying to get them to learn it (a bit like trying to get software built for x86 to run on an ARM processor). Still, I think progress in LLM scaling shows that neural networks (artificial or biological) are able to absorb a significant chunk of human culture, as long as you have the right training method. I’ve made a similar point here.