Comment by kulahan
11 hours ago
Why wouldn't we assume humans are special? We are, by so many metrics. We've become essentially a force of nature, rather than a simple occupying species. I find it much weirder that we're so dedicated to pretending we're normal. Just a normal animal, on a normal planet, in a normal solar system, in a normal galaxy, in a normal universe.
I get we have to do that for science to be good, but I don't get why it carries over to the general populace. We're so sure of so many things science is wary of, this incredibly low self-esteem blows my mind.
Anyways, back on topic, I don't believe any nation is resigned to this fate until I see extreme measures fail. I think I saw that Singapore is giving parents like $55,000 over the lifetime of their child.
> Why wouldn't we assume humans are special?
For me, because the Copernican Principle seems relatively undefeated.
> We've become essentially a force of nature, rather than a simple occupying species.
So are beavers, trees, plankton... they all have huge effects on the planet.
Regarding analysis of animal brains vs. human brains, the more we do, the more we find that we have in common with many other "lesser" species.
Regarding us vs. machines, I certainly believe we are just very complex and sometimes easily programmable analog machines.
This is just my 2 cents on the matter. We are pretty darn neat, but at this point I believe it would be folly to think that we are on some different incomparable plane.
These are good intuitions. I'll add some more:
Orangutans can drive a golf cart, there are videos of that from the pre-AI era. General anesthetics that work on humans also tend to work on them. There is just a smooth gradient of brain evolution.
We don't know exactly what in the brain gets disrupted during general anesthesia (or a baseball bat to the head, for that matter) that causes consciousness to go away, but inquiry has been trending towards lower-level explanations over time, and it's unlikely that it can be fully explained at the biochemical level. We probably need to go down to physics.
Once we're at the physics level, there will be testable hypotheses that work on machines. For example: the pattern and temporal sequence in which particles such as electrons interact with eachother in a circuit dictated by an intelligent computer program may have physical similarities with how particles interact in a human brain, and certain patterns or temporal sequences of interaction may be responsible for human-like consciousness.
Solipsism or simulation theory type of metaphysical positions remain undefeated, but they don't matter for practical purposes because materialism and its accompanying theories of physics have the same predictive power about what I will observe in the future regardless of whether solipsism is true (def true: as real as my own consciousness). If I want to be philosophically rigorous, then I will keep in mind that I can wake up from a simulation at any moment. But until then, physics rules.
It may be that consciousness is not some ideal observer entity thing, but is rather made from and defined by the messy goop of neurons that is mostly the brain, which is changing from moment to moment as cells reorganize, so the definition of "I" is constantly changing in a ship of Theseus kind of way. It may be that nobody has the ideal definition of consciousness (or anything, really), like how nobody has the same definition of an apple even if we're looking at the same apple, because the light bounces off of it slightly differently from my angle of view, so our definitions are only mostly similar. This might be why frontier physics is stuck, because we're current assuming that observations/observers can be defined in a universally identical way. If it turns out that all instances of experience/experiencers are unique and never truly identical, then solving the hard problem of consciousness may end up being equivalent to finding a unified theory of physics, because we'd be trying to describe everything one can observe.
The Copernican Principle is looking weaker than ever. Almost every solar system we find has similarly-sized planets, or planets ordered in an unfortunate way, or shitty suns that bleach them every two weeks. We continue to find system after system after system which looks absolutely nothing like ours.
And there's lots of evidence that we've hit a million unlikely goalposts. We might've gone through more than one great filter already. Whether it's going multicellular, or having a protecting planet like Jupiter, or having Theia slam into us and giving us a moon for tides, or any number of other weird things.
And that's before getting into our specific evolutionary past. If it weren't for dinosaurs ruling the planet, we might not, as mammals, have evolved our extreme adaptability. If it weren't for them then getting wiped out, we wouldn't have had a planet-sized sandbox where nearly every niche was suddenly open again, allowing us to explode in complexity as we essentially spent all day solving survival puzzles. Even then, all of this could've happened underwater and it wouldn't have mattered, because we never would've made fire.
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."
Recently I learned about Human Acceleration Regions (HARs), parts of our DNA that remained almost unchanged in our mammalian ancestors, and then diverged very rapidly in humans between 500-200kya. And it made me wonder, is this why the ancient Hebrews said humans alone are created in the "image and likeness of God"? At any rate, it establishes that we are a very different kind of animal, even from our closest relatives the chimpanzees.
Anthropologists make a similar point from a different perspective: at some point roughly within that time span, human biology and culture began to co-evolve, so cultural practices would bring about physiological changes, which would in turn unlock new practices, and so on.
>Why wouldn't we assume humans are special? We are, by so many metrics. We've become essentially a force of nature, rather than a simple occupying species.
and that specialness appeared when? in our mammal ancestors? our Big Ape ancestors? Australopithecus? Denisovan? Neanderthal? Cro-Magnon? Or only when we started agriculture? or only during Roman Empire? or only during Industrial Revolution?
That "specialness" is actually the religious "soul" in disguise - the "specialness" is used when the people hesitate to directly bring up "soul" in a supposedly rational people conversation where bringing up "soul" is borderline intellectual faux pas. And i'm yet to hear the answer when our ancestors got the "soul".
Btw, all those debates about AI sentience will become moot in just a few years, around 100T models (about the number of our neuron connections). We already have 10T models, so the wait is almost over. We'd be able to directly ask the 100T model whether it is conscious, and no human would probably be able to successfully argue against the model, whatever answer it would give.
Many, many places have tried giving money to have kids. Many.
Thst never works. It's not about money.
It's about biology, likely microplastics acting as hormone inhibitors. Sex drive and reproductive drive are not the same.
It's almost always about the money. Some studies have shown something as simple as free car seats can influence fertility rates.
We know next to nothing about microplastics - pseudoscience can wait at the door.