I know it is dishonest to ask LW-ers to spend time on studying exactly human anatomy, but even a thorough look at some skeleton should give you a vibe of how defined human bodies are.
I see three lines of addressing this concern: 1) Anatomy was over a long time under strong evolutionary pressure. Human intelligence is a fairly recent phenomena of the last 100,000 years. It’s a mess that’s not as well ordered as anatomy. 2) Individual humans deviate more from the textbook anatomy than you would guess by reading the textbook. 3) The brain seems to be build out of basic modules that easily allow it to add an additional color if you edit the DNA in the eye via gene therapy. People with implented magnets can feel magnetic fields. It’s modules allow us to learn complex mental tasks like reading texts which is very far from what we evolved to do.
Also, human intelligence has been evolving exactly as long as human anatomy, it simply leaped forward recently in ways we can notice. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been under strong evolutionary pressure before. I would say that until humans learned to use tools, the pressure on an individual human had had to be stronger.
Also, human intelligence has been evolving exactly as long as human anatomy, it simply leaped forward recently in ways we can notice.
I don’t think that reflects reality. Our anatomy isn’t as different from chimpanzee’s as our minds. Most people hear voices in their head that say stuff to them. Chimpanzee’s don’t have language to do something similar.
I’m not saying otherwise! I’m saying that the formulation has little sense either way. Compare: ‘there is little observed variation in anatomy between apes in broad sense because the evolutionary pressure constraining anatomical changes is too great to allow much viable variation’, ‘there is little observed variation in anatomy …, but not in intelligence, because further evolution of intelligence allows for greater success and so younger branches are more intelligent and better at survival’, ‘only change in anatomy drives change in intelligence, so apparently there was some great hack which translated small changes in anatomy to lead to great changes in intelligence’, ‘chimpanzees never tell us about the voices they hear’...
There are million of years invested into the task about how to move with legs. There’s not millions of years invested into the task of how brains best deal with language.
I think adding lanugage produced something like a quantum leap for the mind and that there’s no similar quantum leap for other organ’s like the human heart.
The quantum leap means that other parts have to adapt and optimize for now language being a major factor.
You could look at IQ.
The mental difference between a human at IQ 70 and a human at IQ 130 is vast. Intelligence is also highly heritable. With a few hundred thousand years and a decent amount of evolutionary pressure on stronger intelligence you wouldn’t have many low IQ people anymore.
And yet textbook anatomy is my best guess about a body when I haven’t seen it, and all deviations are describable compared to it. What I object to is the norm of treating phenomenology, such as the observations about magnets and eye color, as more-or-less solid background for predictions about the future. If we discuss, say, artificial new brain modules, that’s fine by me as long as I keep in mind the potential problems with cranial pressure fluctuations, the need to establish interconnections with other neurons—in some very ordered fashion, building blood vessels to feed it, changes in glucose consumption, even the possibility of your children cgoosing to have completely different artificial modules than you, to the point that heritability becomes obsolete, etc. I am not a specialist to talk about it. I have low priors on anybody here pointing me to The Literature were I to ask.
I think seeing at least the bones and then trying to gauge the distance to what experimental interference one considers possible would be a good thing to happen.
I see three lines of addressing this concern:
1) Anatomy was over a long time under strong evolutionary pressure. Human intelligence is a fairly recent phenomena of the last 100,000 years. It’s a mess that’s not as well ordered as anatomy.
2) Individual humans deviate more from the textbook anatomy than you would guess by reading the textbook.
3) The brain seems to be build out of basic modules that easily allow it to add an additional color if you edit the DNA in the eye via gene therapy. People with implented magnets can feel magnetic fields. It’s modules allow us to learn complex mental tasks like reading texts which is very far from what we evolved to do.
Also, human intelligence has been evolving exactly as long as human anatomy, it simply leaped forward recently in ways we can notice. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been under strong evolutionary pressure before. I would say that until humans learned to use tools, the pressure on an individual human had had to be stronger.
I don’t think that reflects reality. Our anatomy isn’t as different from chimpanzee’s as our minds. Most people hear voices in their head that say stuff to them. Chimpanzee’s don’t have language to do something similar.
I’m not saying otherwise! I’m saying that the formulation has little sense either way. Compare: ‘there is little observed variation in anatomy between apes in broad sense because the evolutionary pressure constraining anatomical changes is too great to allow much viable variation’, ‘there is little observed variation in anatomy …, but not in intelligence, because further evolution of intelligence allows for greater success and so younger branches are more intelligent and better at survival’, ‘only change in anatomy drives change in intelligence, so apparently there was some great hack which translated small changes in anatomy to lead to great changes in intelligence’, ‘chimpanzees never tell us about the voices they hear’...
There are million of years invested into the task about how to move with legs. There’s not millions of years invested into the task of how brains best deal with language.
What do you understand as evolution of the mind, then, and how is it related to that of organs?
I think adding lanugage produced something like a quantum leap for the mind and that there’s no similar quantum leap for other organ’s like the human heart. The quantum leap means that other parts have to adapt and optimize for now language being a major factor.
You could look at IQ.
The mental difference between a human at IQ 70 and a human at IQ 130 is vast. Intelligence is also highly heritable. With a few hundred thousand years and a decent amount of evolutionary pressure on stronger intelligence you wouldn’t have many low IQ people anymore.
And yet textbook anatomy is my best guess about a body when I haven’t seen it, and all deviations are describable compared to it. What I object to is the norm of treating phenomenology, such as the observations about magnets and eye color, as more-or-less solid background for predictions about the future. If we discuss, say, artificial new brain modules, that’s fine by me as long as I keep in mind the potential problems with cranial pressure fluctuations, the need to establish interconnections with other neurons—in some very ordered fashion, building blood vessels to feed it, changes in glucose consumption, even the possibility of your children cgoosing to have completely different artificial modules than you, to the point that heritability becomes obsolete, etc. I am not a specialist to talk about it. I have low priors on anybody here pointing me to The Literature were I to ask.
I think seeing at least the bones and then trying to gauge the distance to what experimental interference one considers possible would be a good thing to happen.