I previously posted Was the K-T event a Great Filter? as a pushback against the notion that different lineages of life on Earth evolving intelligence is really “independent evidence” in any meaningful sense. Intelligence can evolve only if there’s selective pressure favoring it, and a large part of that pressure likely comes from the presence of other intelligent creatures competing for resources. Therefore mammals and birds together really should only count as one data point.
(It’s more plausible that octopus intelligence is independent, since the marine biome is largely separate from the terrestrial, although of course not totally.)
Interesting thought. I think you have a point about coevolution, but I don’t think it explains away everything in the birds vs. mammals case. How much are birds really competing with mammals vs. other birds/other animals? Mammals compete with lots of animals, why did only birds get smarter? I tend to think intra-niche/genus competition would generate most of the pressure for higher intelligence, and for whatever reason that competition doesn’t seem to lead to huge intelligence gains in most species.
(Re: octopus, cephalopods do have interactions with marine mammals. But also, their intelligence is seemingly different from mammals/birds—strong motor intelligence, but they’re not really very social or cooperative. Hard to compare but I’d put them in a lower tier than the top birds/mammals for the parts of intelligence relevant to the Fermi Paradox.)
In terms of the K-T event, I think it could plausibly qualify as a filter, but asteroid impacts of that size are common enough it can’t be the Great Filter on its own—it doesn’t seem the specific details of the impact (location/timing) are rare enough for that.
Huh, seems you are correct. They also apparently are heavily cannibalistic, which might be a good impetus for modeling the intentions of other members of your species…
I came here to say “look at octopods!” but you already have. Yay team! :-)
One of the alignment strategies I have been researching in parallel with many others involves finding examples of human-and-animal benevolence and tracing convergent evolution therein, and proposing that “the shared abstracts here (across these genomes, these brains, these creatures all convergently doing these things)” is probably algorithmically simple, with algorithm-to-reality shims that might also be important, and please study it and lean in the direction of doing “more of that”.
There is an octopod cognate of “ocytocin” (the “maternal love and protection hormone”), but from what I can tell they did NOT re-use it in the ways that we did. But also they mostly lay eggs while abandoning the individual babies to their own survival, rather than raising children carefully.
By contrast, birds and mammals share a relatively similar kind of “high parental investment”!
I previously posted Was the K-T event a Great Filter? as a pushback against the notion that different lineages of life on Earth evolving intelligence is really “independent evidence” in any meaningful sense. Intelligence can evolve only if there’s selective pressure favoring it, and a large part of that pressure likely comes from the presence of other intelligent creatures competing for resources. Therefore mammals and birds together really should only count as one data point.
(It’s more plausible that octopus intelligence is independent, since the marine biome is largely separate from the terrestrial, although of course not totally.)
Interesting thought. I think you have a point about coevolution, but I don’t think it explains away everything in the birds vs. mammals case. How much are birds really competing with mammals vs. other birds/other animals? Mammals compete with lots of animals, why did only birds get smarter? I tend to think intra-niche/genus competition would generate most of the pressure for higher intelligence, and for whatever reason that competition doesn’t seem to lead to huge intelligence gains in most species.
(Re: octopus, cephalopods do have interactions with marine mammals. But also, their intelligence is seemingly different from mammals/birds—strong motor intelligence, but they’re not really very social or cooperative. Hard to compare but I’d put them in a lower tier than the top birds/mammals for the parts of intelligence relevant to the Fermi Paradox.)
In terms of the K-T event, I think it could plausibly qualify as a filter, but asteroid impacts of that size are common enough it can’t be the Great Filter on its own—it doesn’t seem the specific details of the impact (location/timing) are rare enough for that.
The Humboldt squid is an octupus that can coordinate to hunt together.
Huh, seems you are correct. They also apparently are heavily cannibalistic, which might be a good impetus for modeling the intentions of other members of your species…
I searched a bit more and it seems they don’t have personal relationships with other members of the same species the way mammals and birds can.
Personal relationships seem to something that needs intelligence and that birds and mammals evolved separately.
I came here to say “look at octopods!” but you already have. Yay team! :-)
One of the alignment strategies I have been researching in parallel with many others involves finding examples of human-and-animal benevolence and tracing convergent evolution therein, and proposing that “the shared abstracts here (across these genomes, these brains, these creatures all convergently doing these things)” is probably algorithmically simple, with algorithm-to-reality shims that might also be important, and please study it and lean in the direction of doing “more of that”.
There is an octopod cognate of “ocytocin” (the “maternal love and protection hormone”), but from what I can tell they did NOT re-use it in the ways that we did. But also they mostly lay eggs while abandoning the individual babies to their own survival, rather than raising children carefully.
By contrast, birds and mammals share a relatively similar kind of “high parental investment”!