I just finished Diaspora, and realized that everything of Egan’s I’ve read shares the fundamental assumption discussed here: that in the space of intelligence, there’s “down” and there are infinitely many dimensions of “sideways” from where we are, but there’s no meaningful “up”.
But IMO Occam’s Razor distinguishes strongly between the following two hypotheses:
There is a unique level of general intelligence, and it happens to be identical to the level required for hominids to build an agricultural civilization.
There is a bigger hierarchy of general intelligence, and hominids just got smarter until they crossed the “agricultural civilization” threshold.
Apart from theoretical commitments, the first seems to entail a contingent miracle that the second doesn’t.
I just finished Diaspora, and realized that everything of Egan’s I’ve read shares the fundamental assumption discussed here: that in the space of intelligence, there’s “down” and there are infinitely many dimensions of “sideways” from where we are, but there’s no meaningful “up”.
But IMO Occam’s Razor distinguishes strongly between the following two hypotheses:
There is a unique level of general intelligence, and it happens to be identical to the level required for hominids to build an agricultural civilization.
There is a bigger hierarchy of general intelligence, and hominids just got smarter until they crossed the “agricultural civilization” threshold.
Apart from theoretical commitments, the first seems to entail a contingent miracle that the second doesn’t.