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suck my woke dick posted:Because we're talking about what allows a lifeform to go to space. Other forms of advancement may be valid, but regardless of how happy a lifeform that is content to forever live in a bunch of pre-modern villages or mid-size towns* is, it's only relevant to the discussion insofar as it is included in the possibility of intelligent life not bothering to ever go to space. I am phone posting so its a bitch to break up quotes to resond in piecemeal, I apologize. Ah, I was more focused on the discussion of the difference between human/animal intelligence, as this might be the best way to look at human/alien intelligence. I don't want to get into "Well we can never really know, man" territory but I will say you should be hedging all claims of what is needed to go into space with "Because thats how we did it and we dont really know any other way,but their might be one". The assumption that they will need to do similar things to what we did relies on so many other assumptions that if you step back and look at it its pretty shaky. Kinda unrelated but just in response to your last point. It depends on who you believe (its debated back and forth) but ethnographic and archaeological records indicate that people had higher standards of living and societal advancement, by your own definitions, before agriculture is developed. People had more freetime and were more healthy in general before we figured out the whole crop planting thing. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 14:09 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 14:06
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, for example through non-poo poo international development policy. While the number of societies not interested at all in having internet access or satellites might be nonzero, it is very small (especially as a proportion of world population) and most countries that don't have this poo poo lack it because they're currently unable to spend enough money to participate.
" as much as "if being a subsistence farmer is a matter of survival rather than a matter of wanting to go back to your roots which you could stop doing whenever you want, then your society is not advanced"
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Telsa Cola posted:Fire likely is not it. Other species exploit fires just as early homnids would have and by all reckoning have been doing so since wild fires have been a thing. Just because they didnt make a camp fire doesnt mean they werent exploiting cooked food, though Im sure you could argue about the difference in nutrient value in something cooked over a fire rather then something being burned to death in a fire. Wait, what? It's not like if you ever eat one cooked meat you get +45 INT and can go to college. It's that learning to cook or prepare food means you suddenly can get more food energy and take less energy to digest it from the same environment. Which means you evolutionarily can find new uses for excess energy. Same with hunting technology. intelligence snowballs in evolution because once you cross the line of inventing the first few things it removes more and more environmental factors
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Dec 2, 2018 14:15
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Wait, what? It's not like if you ever eat one cooked meat you get +45 INT and can go to college. It's that learning to cook or prepare food means you suddenly can get more food energy and take less energy to digest it from the same environment. Which means you evolutionarily can find new uses for excess energy. Same with hunting technology. intelligence snowballs in evolution because once you cross the line of inventing the first few things it removes more and more environmental factors The same argument, less energy needed to digest food and more food energy, can be made for tool use, since it drastically lowers the amount of calories needed to butcher a carcass and allows access to high nutrient items like bone marrow and brains. With a flint chopper you can get way more meat from a carcass or whatever in a limited amount of time then you could by just tearing or whatever. If you are scavenging or hunting on contested safaris this also means you can get what you need and scram before something meaner then you shows up. There is also a difference in being able to use fire, and being able transport it and/or make it. Granted, tool use and fire use are not mutally exclusive, as you mentioned with hunting technology. Its just best not to look at fire as the singular big thing. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 14:27
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Telsa Cola posted:The same argument, less energy needed to digest food and more food energy, can be made for tool use, since it drastically lowers the amount of calories needed to butcher a carcass and allows access to high nutrient items like bone marrow and brains. With a flint chopper you can get way more meat from a carcass or whatever in a limited amount of time then you could by just tearing or whatever. If you are scavenging or hunting on contested safaris this also means you can get what you need and scram before something meaner then you shows up. Yeah. fire, spears, cooking tools, stone axes, if you are a dumb dumb animal who is just barely scraping along with dim intelligence and just barely barely cross the line you start to build things you suddenly open up huge amounts of energy from the same environment and open more and more the better your tools are and your control of them so it's possible to quickly railroad down that path, where once one guy invents the just barely working rock axe and suddenly is hugely more fit than everyone else, with any kids that are better able to master it being even more advantageous until we got such big brains women's pelvises are splitting and they are dying cuz our head got too big and you gotta stop.
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Dec 2, 2018 14:36
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yeah. fire, spears, cooking tools, stone axes, if you are a dumb dumb animal who is just barely scraping along with dim intelligence and just barely barely cross the line you start to build things you suddenly open up huge amounts of energy from the same environment and open more and more the better your tools are and your control of them so it's possible to quickly railroad down that path, where once one guy invents the just barely working rock axe and suddenly is hugely more fit than everyone else, with any kids that are better able to master it being even more advantageous until we got such big brains women's pelvises are splitting and they are dying cuz our head got too big and you gotta stop. Yes, but this explanation runs into the issue of why other animals who use similar tools do not experince the same run away effects we did. Everything from fish to chimpanzees use at the very least simple tools to make getting access to food easier. I guess thats where cultural transmission comes into play, but then you have animals where we are pretty sure they do that too and then it just gets harder and harder to figure out what the gently caress. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 14:43 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 14:40
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Telsa Cola posted:Yes, but this explanation runs into the issue of why other animals who use similar tools do not experince the same run away effects we did. Have we not? all the good examples of tool using animals are much much much smarter than similar species that don't use tools. octopuses are nearly unfathomably smarter than most invertebrates even while still having a bad invertebrate brain. And like I mentioned before, bottlenose dolphins and elephants, the two most complex tool using animals, are somewhat younger species than hominids, and it's absolutely possible the dolphins putting sponges on their nose and the elephants covering water with stuff so it doesn't dry up too fast would have been the australopithecus of elephants.
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Dec 2, 2018 14:54
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Have we not? all the good examples of tool using animals are much much much smarter than similar species that don't use tools. octopuses are nearly unfathomably smarter than most invertebrates even while still having a bad invertebrate brain. And like I mentioned before, bottlenose dolphins and elephants, the two most complex tool using animals, are somewhat younger species than hominids, and it's absolutely possible the dolphins putting sponges on their nose and the elephants covering water with stuff so it doesn't dry up too fast would have been the australopithecus of elephants. Fish will use rocks to break poo poo open, alligators and such will lay traps with sticks to lure food to them. I wouldnt say either of them display the effects of run away intelligence growth? Its also possible that the evolutionary predecessors for elephants and dolphins did the same thing with tool use, so focusing on them being younger species seems odd. Its entirely possible that they have had as much time as homnids to experience the effects. There is some interesting archaeology researching being done now thats looking at evidence of animal tool use in the archaeological record, though anything underwater is out.
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Dec 2, 2018 15:07
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Telsa Cola posted:Kinda unrelated but just in response to your last point. It depends on who you believe (its debated back and forth) but ethnographic and archaeological records indicate that people had higher standards of living and societal advancement, by your own definitions, before agriculture is developed. People had more freetime and were more healthy in general before we figured out the whole crop planting thing. Telsa Cola posted:I guess thats where cultural transmission comes into play, but then you have animals where we are pretty sure they do that too and then it just gets harder and harder to figure out what the gently caress. Yes. Before writing, humans are probably still able to transmit information more effectively than other somewhat intelligent animals. It's probably only necessary to very slightly tip the balance from lost vs gained knowledge to produce a large difference in results.
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Dec 2, 2018 15:13
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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suck my woke dick posted:The thing with hunter-gatherers is that, while this might be a sustainable type of society for small numbers of people, it's also completely unable to compete with societies that have more consistent and easily accessible sources of energy and thus high population density through agriculture. While the individuals might not live as well during the initial transition to agriculture, long-term preservation of hunter-gatherer lifestyles is probably only possible by intentionally limiting disruptions (or flat-out war) by their neighbours. Depending on where you live you can get decently high population densities. California basically had zero agricultural societies, you get some bleed over when you get to the Southwest state borders but basically everyone was complex hunter gathers because the environment worked well for it with some modifications to the fire cycle. Coastal communities basically have constant access to food too, though I imagine they experince fission before the populations get too big for the environment. California basically had the highest population density of people by region in North America above Mexico for a long rear end time because if this.
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Dec 2, 2018 15:19
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Telsa Cola posted:Fish will use rocks to break poo poo open, alligators and such will lay traps with sticks to lure food to them. I wouldnt say either of them display the effects of run away intelligence growth? You are kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel on tool use. But sure, we can't know what the future will/would have held and maybe the exponential growth applies to alligators too and 50 million years from now the ones with sticks on their nose will be building airplanes because of the extremely small step of very extremely small tool use now accelerating their intelligence going forward. quote:Its entirely possible that they have had as much time as homnids to experience the effects. or maybe more time, but evolution is a process with huge random elements no matter how directed it is, even if something is hugely favored you still are going to have it happen at it's own speed. If by luck elephants and hominids started the same exact day millions of years ago and humans are at jet planes and elephants are at "moving things to stand on them and using sticks to hit things" that isn't actually that huge of a difference given the time scale. You'd always expect variation in exactly how long any evolution takes even if something is favored.
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Dec 2, 2018 15:23
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:like pigs and dogs are only a few thousand years old and come from ancestors like wolves and boars that are only evolved 4-8 million years ago, bottle nose dolphins are only 5 million years old, chimps are 5-8 (and basically did evolve intelligence by being us), modern elephants have only been around for a million years. I don't really know how to word this correctly but I kind of wonder if evolutionary pressure has made animals, on average, more intelligent overall now than any point in the past, even if Humans could be somehow excluded. I mean, just think of life on earth 500 million years ago, was there a single creature on earth that could boast to have the mental faculties of the very stupidest vertebrate around today? Skip forward 350 million years later, it's the latest Jurassic, from any of the evidence we can dig up revolving around things like braincase size do any of the dinosaurs compare favorably to modern day animals in similar ecological niches? Not even talking about things like Apes and Dolphins but how does Stegosaurus compare to a Rhinoceros, or Allosaurus to a Lion? Skip forward again to the latest Cretaceous and to the best of my knowledge a creature like Tyrannosaurus seems to have possessed a much large brain size than similar Predators from ages past like Carcharodontosaurus, meanwhile the stereo-typically "smart" dinosaurs like Troodon was present then, but even that dinosaur's capabilities would have been closer to something like an Opossum rather than a dog, and extant birds like Corvids and Psittacines seem to have left all of their non-avian ancestors completely in the dust when it comes to brains. I know this is dreadfully unscientific and it's unbelievably hard to ascertain the intelligence of a creature from fossils, but I've got this sneaking suspicion that on the grandest scale, since the emergence of complex life evolution has been pushing many organisms towards greater intelligence without the overall conditions on Earth changing that much, if that's the case then eventually evolving human like intelligence might be almost inevitable after complex, multi-cellular land life appears.
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Dec 2, 2018 17:14
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khwarezm posted:I don't really know how to word this correctly but I kind of wonder if evolutionary pressure has made animals, on average, more intelligent overall now than any point in the past, even if Humans could be somehow excluded. We basically know that to be true. We talk about brains as being just one thing, but they really are groups of organs doing a bunch of things and those organs appeared over time. Like the various leaps in intelligence mostly came with whole new brain organs or major mutations in current brain organs into new functions instead of just using the same old brain better. Like you can look reptiles to monotremes to mammals where reptiles have no neocortex, monotremes have a small one that connects poorly then all mammals have one and humans have it taking up a large part of their whole head. While birds developed "Nidopallium" that reptiles didn't have and in the same way dumb birds have it but it's a small part of the brain but by the time you get up to ravens it's filling their head.
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Dec 2, 2018 18:15
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Ants (i) practice engineering and agriculture, (ii) domesticate other animals for food, (iii) make war for territory and resources, and take slaves, (iv) recognize each other on an individual level, (v) get better at their tasks over the course of their lives, (vi) deliberately inoculate each other from pathogens, (vii) isolate themselves from the colony if they are very ill, (viii) will attempt to rescue one another from peril ,even at risk, (ix) will rescue the "children" first, and (x) have established thriving settlements on every continent except Antarctica, even in the harshest deserts or most oppressive jungles. That's just for openers. Collectively, ants represent approximately 20% of the biomass...of Earth. They barely have an identifiable brain. These things live in your yard, are using like 15 techs from Civ 5, and piss on dolphins, crows, etc etc. Yes, they "piss". They piss in designated toilet areas in their colonies, separate from general trash areas. The search for "intelligence", for neural complexity and other para-scientific babble, is complete vanity. Stick to the evidence, not some intrinsic and self-validating determination of what is smart or not. (caveat: these behaviors are distributed throughout various ant groups, only ~10% of which have been studied).
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Dec 3, 2018 16:27
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suck my woke dick posted:a few pages back, but you're I worded that poorly -- I meant that mitochondria only happened once, not endosymbiosis broadly
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Dec 3, 2018 16:41
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physeter posted:Ants (i) practice engineering and agriculture, (ii) domesticate other animals for food, (iii) make war for territory and resources, and take slaves, (iv) recognize each other on an individual level, (v) get better at their tasks over the course of their lives, (vi) deliberately inoculate each other from pathogens, (vii) isolate themselves from the colony if they are very ill, (viii) will attempt to rescue one another from peril ,even at risk, (ix) will rescue the "children" first, and (x) have established thriving settlements on every continent except Antarctica, even in the harshest deserts or most oppressive jungles. That's just for openers. There is tons of sci-fi about killer bugs from beyond the stars and leiningen versus the ants but xenomorphs and alien bug hiveminds, but is there any sci-fi where we meet aliens and they are all just mindless ants that just eventually have a bunch of evolved behaviors that result in space ships and stuff and our thing of thinking about stuff and coming up with things personally is a weird aberration compared to the normal way of inventing things by evolving the task over millions of fast dying generations?
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Dec 3, 2018 16:56
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I don't know. But I do know that "hivemind" is a sci-fi creation, if not least because telepathy isn't real. Modern studies of bees and ants show a startling level of individual decision making.
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Dec 3, 2018 17:18
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:There is tons of sci-fi about killer bugs from beyond the stars and leiningen versus the ants but xenomorphs and alien bug hiveminds, but is there any sci-fi where we meet aliens and they are all just mindless ants that just eventually have a bunch of evolved behaviors that result in space ships and stuff and our thing of thinking about stuff and coming up with things personally is a weird aberration compared to the normal way of inventing things by evolving the task over millions of fast dying generations? Blindsight.
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Dec 3, 2018 17:47
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Put another way, if we discover a group of elephants running a farm, keeping a herd of antelopes for milking, and displaying a general concern about their personal and group hygiene and welfare...there's not much question in most people's mind as to whether they are intelligent. The only question is whether we can adequately understand their "intelligence" and communicate with them. Maybe we can or maybe we can't, and maybe there's no point, but you've found an intelligence of the only kind that is ever going to matter in an ablative universe. Ants have been owning this planet for 150 million years, farming fungus for about 50 million years, and survived at least one major mass extinction. Humans should be so lucky.
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Dec 3, 2018 18:42
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physeter posted:I don't know. But I do know that "hivemind" is a sci-fi creation, if not least because telepathy isn't real. Psionic magic isn't real, but like, you are just a cluster of cells that can think things that isn't just an addition of the 'brainpower' of each cell. Likewise an ant colony can do very complex behaviors that arise from each individual ant doing pretty simple stuff. A human society can do way more than a person can. Cells don't feel like individuals, members of societies feel like individuals, I don't really have any idea if ants or ant hills think anything, or who thinks of themselves as the part or the whole. I don't know if some alien society could be alien enough to not notice it's individual (possibly mindless) members the way I don't notice my cells as individuals.
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Dec 3, 2018 18:55
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Psionic magic isn't real, but like, you are just a cluster of cells that can think things that isn't just an addition of the 'brainpower' of each cell. Likewise an ant colony can do very complex behaviors that arise from each individual ant doing pretty simple stuff. Owlofcreamcheese posted:A human society can do way more than a person can. So it's pretty dumb to attribute spontaneous hive mind emergence to insects or aliens. No biological mechanism exists to support it, and it's just lazy thinking. The most likely explanation for an organism doing something smart is that it is smart, not that it shits out some sort of gestalt intellect into the non-existo-sphere.
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Dec 3, 2018 20:06
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physeter posted:Ants aren't cells, or cells in anything. They too are comprised of cells. It's not magic, your brain is made of cells but is smarter than any of the cells. You are made of cells with no single "you cell" as the leader. And ant colonies can build complex structures without the need for an engineer ant, just a bunch of individual ants individually doing simple actions with no vision for the greater task. There is no magic psychic link, but if your body can be an individual I don't see why a bunch of genetically identical ants can't be collectively. If I wanna evolve my cells to be a bunch of unconnected parts, as long as they can communicate by nonmagic means that seems fine.
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Dec 3, 2018 20:23
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It's kind of apropos of nothing, but the position of your avatar and the text inside it makes it look to me like the TRex fatbird just shat out the words "T-Rex" and it amuses me. 
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Dec 3, 2018 20:32
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It's not magic, your brain is made of cells but is smarter than any of the cells. You are made of cells with no single "you cell" as the leader. And ant colonies..." In short, there is no reason for your ant collective intelligence to exist. They solve their problems just fine without it. You just want to to be there because you think it's cool, not because the evidence suggests it is likely, possible or necessary.
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Dec 3, 2018 20:55
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physeter posted:Are not comprised of cells, and have leaders. An ant which finds food will scent mark it and lead other ants to the location. An ant which finds a good spot for an expansion colony will lead other ants to the new location, choosing new ants each time, to build consensus for its selection. One ant, leading another ant somewhere, will even deliberately slow down to let the second ant catch up. Because it is leading, and on some level, is aware of it. Your cells have a bunch of complicated behaviors and chemical communications too, you still experiance yourself as yourself not as a bunch of jossiling cells. You are still a colony.
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Dec 3, 2018 21:12
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Your cells have a bunch of complicated behaviors and chemical communications too, you still experiance yourself as yourself not as a bunch of jossiling cells. Can you actually provide any evidence that insect colonies have a "hive mind"?
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Dec 3, 2018 21:41
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The Butcher posted:Sometimes I think too hard about fundamental physics poo poo and get all bothered by it before dumping it from my brain and getting drunk and watching hockey or whatever. This is from a bit back but I'm waiting for some code to run so I figure I'll give a quick synopsis of a cool book I read that attempts to answer this, Our Mathematical Universe. https://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Reality/dp/0307599809 It's written by a Swedish-American cosmologist named Max Tegmark and is divided into 2 sections, the first covering basically everything we know and setting things up for the 2nd section which is wild theorizing and may or may not be provable, but is an interesting idea. In the first bit he outlines all the physical features of our universe and how odd it is but describes a framework for 3 "types" of muli-verses, based on our current scientific understanding. He uses a lot more detail but to summarize: 1) Our actual Universe, aka the level where you describe initial conditions (Level 1) Consider our observable universe. Since light can only travel so far and move so fast our understanding of the universe is limited to what we can observe. Right now that's about 83,000,000,000 light years across. However if we all shifted say, 5 light years in any direction, we'd still only be able to see 83 Gly, but the last 5 light years of that would be slightly different from what we can see right here on earth. If we move further, we just find that different parts of the universe are visible and that space is truly infinite. Which is really neat! But the real neat part comes next. Because of quantum mechanics there are only so many possible positions an area of space can take. That is, if you have a 1x1x1 square of space, there's a limit on the different ways you can arrange matter in it. It's a very, very high limit but a limit nonetheless. If you move far enough over in space, you might find the exact same arrangement since the number of arrangements is limited and a 1 cubic meter space is pretty small. Similarly, there's a cap on the positions all the quantum particles in our ~83 Gly observable universe can take and if we know that the space in the universe is infinite, it means there's effectively copies of our observable universe everywhere, you just need to move "far enough". So there's a parallel you reading this post somewhere. It's interesting but kind of trivial if you think about it. 2) Cosmic Inflation, aka the level where you describe fundamental physical constants (Level 2) This was the part that I enjoyed the most as it explained what exactly the Big Bang was. There's a level "above" our universe where the Big Bang originated as a singularity that suddenly experienced cosmic inflation. But our little singularity wasn't special or unique and there are an infinite number of them "next door". The interesting thing about them is that they all can take on different values for fundamental physical constants like gravity, electro-magnetism, nuclear forces, etc. The only reason things are the way they are here is because the inflationary bubble we are in happened to have these constants set the way they are and those happen to be the ones that can produce intelligent life. The cosmic bubble next door where atoms can't form isn't the one we're in because we need atoms for life. We can't travel to these or necessarily observe them because matter acts fundamentally different from how it does here. 3) Quantum Many Worlds, aka the level where you describe what quantum branch you're on (Level 3) This took a long time in his book to setup but the tl;dr is that Many Worlds is the right interpretation for quantum mechanics and it forms another multiverse that contains our particular version of Level 1 and Level 2. Even though this is another level "above" level 2, it functionally acts just like Level 1 since we can never go to Level 2 multiverses because matter stops working right (and if matter does work the same as here it's just another way of describing Level 1) This is all again, based pretty solidly on current scientific understanding. I think cosmic inflation as a theory may be a bit new or controversial but the other areas are not. However, the author still had one nagging question in the back of his mind, namely: Why Does Math Work to Describe All Of These? When you think about it, it's a bit odd as we've discarded nearly everything we've ever used to describe reality to replace it with another tool. But we've never done that to math...why? Additionally, we keep finding new ways of describing the world but those just lead to more and more questions. It's the "turtles all the way" down problem where it things just keep iterating further and further and getting more and more abstract. Tegmark's conclusion, which again, he spends half of the book describing and defending is that there is a 4th tier of multiverse above everything. He theorizes that the ultimate laws of the multiverse, reality, etc. are that everything is just a physical manifestation of the concepts as described by mathematics. The "real" reality is just that everything's all numbers...literally. That is, the physical universe is not merely described by mathematics, but is mathematics (specifically, a mathematical structure). Mathematical existence equals physical existence, and all structures that exist mathematically exist physically as well. Which is weird as gently caress and I still can't quite describe it as well as he can. It basically is radical neo-Platonicism but he makes a fairly good case for why even if you don't agree with it, you probably can't rule it out. There's a wikipedia article on it if you're curious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis I figured people itt would like the book and be interested by it because the author's an actual scientist and does a good job of summarizing all of human knowledge about the cosmos circa the early 2010s and goes much more in depth about things than I have seen elsewhere. Plus his radical neo-Platonic model is something people might want to debate and discuss because there is literally no way to prove an argument about it right or wrong as we lack evidence, but you can still poke some good logical holes in it. So what does everyone think?
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Dec 3, 2018 22:02
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physeter posted:Can you actually provide any evidence that insect colonies have a "hive mind"? Ants have agriculture and engineering but they aren't like bee movie where they are little people that live in a tiny city and each ant is a guy who knows that stuff. Each ant is taking relatively simple actions. When they study ants building a tower each individual ant is only following a dozen rules. But the aggregate is that the antS collectively have skills and knowledge that no particular ANT has. No ant knows how to build a tower but a bunch of ants can build a tower. The knowledge exists at a level higher but there is no ant king doing it, and no psychic manifestation of that ant king either, ANTS just know things that single ants don't their bodies and brains are evolved to be only a part of the whole and the whole can do things no one ant is aware of. It's not some mystical thing where they have a psychic link and turns into a guy that moves them around like an RTS. It's the fact complex systems can have properties that no one part of the system individually has. Same as the way you aren't a psychic discussion between a trillion cells but you can do things and think things no one cell would because the aggregate output of a bunch of cells following simple rules is complex behavior.
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Dec 3, 2018 22:10
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physeter posted:Your posts have a bunch of sciency words and fantasy nonsense, and you still experience yourself as an intellectual, and not as a bunch of unsubstantiated childish ideas wrapped in noisy meat. I don't think OOCC is arguing ants have a conscious hive mind, but rather that even though ants are individual organisms when they're grouped together they behave in ways that accomplish large, organized tasks. By that logic though, humanity has a hive mind which...I'm not actually as opposed to arguing as I thought I would be.
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Dec 3, 2018 22:20
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axeil posted:I don't think OOCC is arguing ants have a conscious hive mind, but rather that even though ants are individual organisms when they're grouped together they behave in ways that accomplish large, organized tasks. Yes, that. Like an ant colony can farm but if you watch what each actual ant does it's all just really simple repetitive tasks, but the simple ruleset can create complex behaviors on a larger scale. And I'm not sure what would put an upper limit on that, like maybe some alien ant can start fires, (If someone found out earth ants intentionally start fires that would be zero amount shocking, if someone links we already know they do that wouldn't surprise me), could some forge metal? have electricity? build space ships? Is there some level of technology where you absolutely positively have to stop with ants following simple rules robotically coming up with complex solutions through evolved behavior as a hive or is it like cells where the cells acting collectively is an individual that comes up with complex solutions in it's own right.
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Dec 3, 2018 22:41
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Seconding the recommendation of Blindsight by Peter Watts on this topic. (sadly Echopraxia was a bit of a letdown in comparison) I'd argue in fact that we're seeing something very similar among humans when we're looking at organisational knowledge and culture. And while i missed the worst of it i'd say this applies to large parts of the thread: Ursula K. Le Guin posted:The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.
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Dec 3, 2018 22:49
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axeil posted:So what does everyone think? That sounds like extremely my poo poo, and is going onto my Kindle now. Thanks for the detailed recommendo.
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Dec 3, 2018 23:02
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Bistromatic posted:I'd argue in fact that we're seeing something very similar among humans when we're looking at organisational knowledge and culture. Yeah, if you took a baby and left them alone to grow up on a desert island they would be as dumb as the animals from millions of years ago. Culture absolutely has elements of being a superorganism. but somewhere in the middle on the spectrum, because like, human farmers personally know how to farm, unlike ants, but if all the farmers died our culture also knows how to farm and we could look it up. I wonder if you could have the other extreme? a bunch of intelligent creatures hanging out but with minimal knowledge that existed beyond individual knowledge. Like they have farmers but only because every generation a group of people have to independently deduce the concept of agriculture totally on their own. with minimal information sharing possible.
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Dec 3, 2018 23:41
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axeil posted:So what does everyone think? Don't mistake an interpretation of the math for the math.
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Dec 4, 2018 02:06
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BrandorKP posted:Don't mistake an interpretation of the math for the math. Wait, what? I thought the whole point of math being this interesting in these kinds of topics is that it's NOT up for interpretation. It seems to be the only thing that always works the same way no matter the reference frame, and can always be reduced to zeros and ones, right down to the rules of how the universe works. Language is fucky, and can constrain or otherwise frame how things can be understood. Not sure if it's the right term, but math sorta works outside of language. Zero's and ones all the way down.
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Dec 4, 2018 06:35
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The Butcher posted:Wait, what? Many worlds is an interpretation of the wave function. The wave function is the math. Furthermore math is language. It (math) is just symbols we came up with to talk about what we observe of reality. It's our created tool.
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Dec 4, 2018 06:56
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yes, that. Like an ant colony can farm but if you watch what each actual ant does it's all just really simple repetitive tasks, but the simple ruleset can create complex behaviors on a larger scale. Well, ants are eusocial--they have a regimented society with divisions of labor. Which is one way they differ from your cells in that eusocial creatures divide labor between reproductive and non-reproductive roles whereas almost all of your cells reproduce in-place to make you grow and to replace themselves. Another way eusocial creatures differ from your cells is that they aren't really any less intelligent or less sentient as individuals than an equivalent member of a non-eusocial species (for example, a beetle), whereas your cells aren't sentient even though you are. If you're looking at how an alien colony animal would become capable of technological innovation comparative to humans, I'd guess it would form a "thinking" caste that innovates, teaches individuals, and creates new castes for these tasks. Whether the "thinker caste" or any members of the species become sapient is an interesting question, but no form of language and communication between separate creatures is really on the level of how your cells communicate and regulate themselves.
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Dec 4, 2018 07:19
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BrandorKP posted:Many worlds is an interpretation of the wave function. The wave function is the math. Every last piece of science from applied mathematics to physics to chemistry to biochemistry to biology and so on is just tools and models we've created to describe the universe using language and visual aids we can understand. 
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Dec 4, 2018 07:28
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Yes exactly.
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Dec 4, 2018 07:47
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BrandorKP posted:Furthermore math is language. It (math) is just symbols we came up with to talk about what we observe of reality. It's our created tool. Basic rear end, fundamental math seems like it should be more universal than language though. On or off. Yes or no. Thing or not thing. 1 or 0, or whatever you want to use to represent it. 1+1=2 will always come out the same way in this universe no matter how you say the words, no?
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Dec 4, 2018 08:02
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The Butcher posted:1+1=2 will always come out the same way in this universe no matter how you say the words, no? No.
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Dec 4, 2018 08:06
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