Re: >H White-noise ETs

["Jason Joel Thompson" <jase1@uniserve.com>]

Transhuman Mailing List


Once again, non-human animals understanding powers are qualitatively
different from humans (like in 0 and 1) while the main differences between
humans and SI can be expect to be only quantitative (like 1 and 10^10).


Is it necessarily clear that our understanding powers are qualitatively
different from those of the advanced primates?

And even granting that is the case, should that lead us to the conclusion
that there are no further qualitative leaps down the road of intelligence?
You operate under the assumption that there is one basic qualitative
intellectual jump available to complex adaptive systems-- the one that we
have taken.  But isn't it instead clear that the continuum of intelligence
on this planet is punctuated by an array of qualitative steps, of which ours
is but the latest?

Plants, microbes, insect-life, animal-life, human kind, all represent
various stages of cognitive development and the fact the we seem to have
taken a really big step forward only appears to me as evidence of even
greater steps in the future.  Your insistence that 'if we only keep an open
mind, we'll be able to figure it all out in a general way,' is a premise
developed under suspect conditions: your current level of understanding.

Sure, it would be -nice- if we could grasp the machinations of the highest
possible forms of intelligence in the universe, but there is really no good
reason to believe that we are going to be able to do so.  If we are indeed
near the base of the curve, we can only expect that things are going to get
mighty exciting from here on out.



    ::jason joel thompson::

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