Comment by tshaddox
5 days ago
Is it just dumb luck that we're able to create knowledge about black holes, quarks, and lots of things in between which presumably had zero evolutionary benefit before a handful of generations ago?
5 days ago
Is it just dumb luck that we're able to create knowledge about black holes, quarks, and lots of things in between which presumably had zero evolutionary benefit before a handful of generations ago?
Basically yes it is luck, in the sense that evolution is just randomness with a filter of death applied, so whatever brains we happen to have are just luck.
The brains we did end up with are really bad at creating that sort of knowledge. Almost none of us can. But we’re good at communicating, coming up with simplified models of things, and seeing how ideas interact.
We’re not universe-understanders, we’re behavior modelers and concept explainers.
I wasn't referring the "luck" factor of evolution, which is of course always there. I was asking whether "luck" is the reason that the cognitive capabilities which presumably were selected for also came with cognitive capabilities that almost certainly were not selected for.
My guess is that it's not dumb luck, and that what we evolved is in fact general intelligence, and that this was an "easier" way to adapt to environmental pressure than to evolve a grab bag of specific (non-general) cognitive abilities. An implication of this claim would be that we are universe-understanders (or at least that we are biologically capable of that, given the right resources and culture).
In other words, it's roughly the same answer for the question "why do washing machines have Turing complete microcontrollers in them when they only need to do a very small number of computing tasks?" At scale, once you know how to implement general (i.e. Turing-complete and programmable) computers it tends to be simpler to use them than to create purpose-built computer hardware.
Evolution rewarded us for developing general intelligence. But with a very immediate practical focus and not too much specialisation.