About your intuition that evolution made brains optimal… well but then there are people like John von Neumann who clearly demonstrate that the human brain can be orders of magnitude more productive without significantly higher energy costs.
My model of the human brain isn’t that it’s the most powerful biological information processing organ possible—far from it. In my view of the world we are merely the first species that passed an intelligence treshold allowing it to produce a technological civilisation. As soon as a species passed that treshold civilisation popped into existence.
We are the dumbest species possible that still manages to coordinate and accumulate technology. This doesn’t tell you much about what the limits of biology are.
About your intuition that evolution made brains optimal… well but then there are people like John von Neumann who clearly demonstrate that the human brain can be orders of magnitude more productive without significantly higher energy costs.
Optimal is a word one should use with caution and always with respect to some measure, and I use it selectively, usually as ‘near-optimal’ or some such. The article does not argue that brains are ‘optimal’ in some generic sense. I referenced JVN just as an example of a mentat—that human brains are capable of learning more reasonably efficient numeric circuits, even though that’s well outside of evolutionary objectives. JVN certainly isn’t the only example of a human mentat like that, and he certainly isn’t evidence “that the human brain can be orders of magnitude more productive”.
We are the dumbest species possible that still manages to coordinate and accumulate technology. This doesn’t tell you much about what the limits of biology are.
Sure, I agree your stated “humans first to cross the finish line” model (or really EY’s) doesn’t tell you much about the limits of biology. To understand the actual limits of biology, you have to identify what those actual physical limits are, and then evaluate how close brains are to said limits. That is in fact what this article does.
In my view of the world we are merely the first species that passed an intelligence treshold allowing it to produce a technological civilisation. As soon as a species passed that treshold civilisation popped into existence.
We passed the threshold for language. We passed the threshold from evolutionarily specific intelligence to universal Turing Machines style intelligence through linguistic mental programs/programming. Before that everything a big brain learns during a lifetime is lost, after that it allowed for immortal substrate independent mental programs to evolve separately from the disposable brain soma: cultural/memetic evolution. This is a one time major phase shift in evolution, not some specific brain adaptation (even though some of the latter obviously enables the former).
About your intuition that evolution made brains optimal… well but then there are people like John von Neumann who clearly demonstrate that the human brain can be orders of magnitude more productive without significantly higher energy costs.
My model of the human brain isn’t that it’s the most powerful biological information processing organ possible—far from it. In my view of the world we are merely the first species that passed an intelligence treshold allowing it to produce a technological civilisation. As soon as a species passed that treshold civilisation popped into existence.
We are the dumbest species possible that still manages to coordinate and accumulate technology. This doesn’t tell you much about what the limits of biology are.
Optimal is a word one should use with caution and always with respect to some measure, and I use it selectively, usually as ‘near-optimal’ or some such. The article does not argue that brains are ‘optimal’ in some generic sense. I referenced JVN just as an example of a mentat—that human brains are capable of learning more reasonably efficient numeric circuits, even though that’s well outside of evolutionary objectives. JVN certainly isn’t the only example of a human mentat like that, and he certainly isn’t evidence “that the human brain can be orders of magnitude more productive”.
Sure, I agree your stated “humans first to cross the finish line” model (or really EY’s) doesn’t tell you much about the limits of biology. To understand the actual limits of biology, you have to identify what those actual physical limits are, and then evaluate how close brains are to said limits. That is in fact what this article does.
We passed the threshold for language. We passed the threshold from evolutionarily specific intelligence to universal Turing Machines style intelligence through linguistic mental programs/programming. Before that everything a big brain learns during a lifetime is lost, after that it allowed for immortal substrate independent mental programs to evolve separately from the disposable brain soma: cultural/memetic evolution. This is a one time major phase shift in evolution, not some specific brain adaptation (even though some of the latter obviously enables the former).