> Every single life form on Earth today had exactly the same time to do its evolution in. Us, bats, dolphins, tapeworms, birch trees, amoeba, mushrooms, all of that had exactly the same chance(s) in the same time span.
This is patently false as these species have very different places within the phylogenetic tree. Emphasis on tree, since their adaptivity experiments did not have a linear timeline either; we didn’t evolve to have speech from scratch, we’ve adopted existing partial solutions, e.g. having a tongue, to develop it.
And we don’t need to delve into phenomenology of being a mushroom, adaptivity gives us an observable proxy to the “intelligence” of an organism; how general and efficient of a problem solver they are, the ultimate problem being surviving genes onward. Turns out humans do exceptionally well, for the problems they’ve encountered so far. We’ll see if/how we can solve anthropogenic coordination problems of our day.
> That Star Trek trope of "everything in the Universe is just like us with different faces" really needs to be put to rest.
You need to cook a "complex adaptive organism" solution with the same periodic table and a handful of forces. It's like coding a CRUD application with slightly different sub-requirements and the exact same programming language. How different can they be?
If you need more creativity you have to break apart from physical requirements and the right genre for that is fantasy.
"And we don’t need to delve into phenomenology of being a mushroom, adaptivity gives us an observable proxy to the “intelligence” of an organism; how general and efficient of a problem solver they are, the ultimate problem being surviving genes onward."
By that logic the most intelligent animals is a cockroach
Viruses and prions reproduce, not only are they not intelligent, they are not even alive.
> By that logic the most intelligent animals is a cockroach
Firstly, please notice the quotes around intelligence; clearly we’re playing with a fast and loose definition.
Secondly, if humans had driven themselves into extinction with nuclear warfare, that would as well have been true.
Intelligence is not mere symbolic processing, nor symbolic processing is guaranteed to be adaptive, as evidenced with its failure modes in our perennial irrationalities.
> Viruses and prions reproduce, not only are they not intelligent, they are not even alive.
I know one particular virus twisting humanity’s arm these days, and in a way that is not fully intelligible to us yet. I wouldn’t readily diminish the internal logic that’s going on there.
This is patently false as these species have very different places within the phylogenetic tree. Emphasis on tree, since their adaptivity experiments did not have a linear timeline either; we didn’t evolve to have speech from scratch, we’ve adopted existing partial solutions, e.g. having a tongue, to develop it.
And we don’t need to delve into phenomenology of being a mushroom, adaptivity gives us an observable proxy to the “intelligence” of an organism; how general and efficient of a problem solver they are, the ultimate problem being surviving genes onward. Turns out humans do exceptionally well, for the problems they’ve encountered so far. We’ll see if/how we can solve anthropogenic coordination problems of our day.
> That Star Trek trope of "everything in the Universe is just like us with different faces" really needs to be put to rest.
You need to cook a "complex adaptive organism" solution with the same periodic table and a handful of forces. It's like coding a CRUD application with slightly different sub-requirements and the exact same programming language. How different can they be?
If you need more creativity you have to break apart from physical requirements and the right genre for that is fantasy.