[SEQ RERUN] Surprised By Brains

Today’s post, Surprised by Brains was originally published on 23 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you hadn’t ever seen brains before, but had only seen evolution, you might start making astounding predictions about their ability. You might, for instance, think that creatures with brains might someday be able to create complex machinery in only a millenium.


Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Billion Dollar Bots, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.