Moreover, I don’t think that some extra/different planning machinery was required for language itself, beyond the existing abstraction and model-based RL capabilities that many other animals share.
I would expect to see sophisticated ape/early-hominid-lvl culture in many more species if that was the case. For some reason humans went on the culture RSI trajectory whereas other animals didn’t. Plausibly there was some seed cognitive ability (plus some other contextual enablers) that allowed a gene-culture “coevolution” cycle to start.
Nowadays, I think the main reason humans took off is because human hands were extremely suited for tool use and being at range, which means that there is a selection effect at both the genetic level for more general intelligence and a selection effect on cultures for more cultural learning, and animals just mostly lack this by default, meaning that their intelligence is way less relevant than their lack of good actuators for tool use.
I would expect to see sophisticated ape/early-hominid-lvl culture in many more species if that was the case. For some reason humans went on the culture RSI trajectory whereas other animals didn’t. Plausibly there was some seed cognitive ability (plus some other contextual enablers) that allowed a gene-culture “coevolution” cycle to start.
Nowadays, I think the main reason humans took off is because human hands were extremely suited for tool use and being at range, which means that there is a selection effect at both the genetic level for more general intelligence and a selection effect on cultures for more cultural learning, and animals just mostly lack this by default, meaning that their intelligence is way less relevant than their lack of good actuators for tool use.