My mother is a psychologist, father—an applied physicist, aunt 1 - a former morgue cytologist, aunt 2 - a practicing ultrasound specialist, father-in-law—a general practitioner, husband—a biochemist, my friends (c. 5) are biologists, and most of my immediate coworkers teach either chemistry or biology. (Occasionally I talk to other people, too.) I’m mentioning this to describe the scope of my experience with how they come to terms with the ‘animal part’ of the human being; when I started reading LW I felt immediately that people here come from different backgrounds. It felt implied that ‘rationality’ was a culture of either hacking humanity, or patching together the best practices accumulated in the past (or even just adopting the past), because clearly, we are held back by social constraints—if we weren’t, we’d be able to fully realize our winning potential. (I’m strawmanning a bit, yes.) For a while I ignored the voice in the back of my mind that kept mumbling ‘inferential distances between the dreams of these people and the underlying wetware are too great for you to estimate’, or some such, but I don’t want to anymore.
To put it simply, there is a marked difference within biologists in how reverently they view the gross (and fine) human anatomy, in how easily they accept that a body is just a thing, composed of matter, with charges and insulation and stuff -just a system of tubes, but still not a car in which you can individually tweak the axles and the windshield (probably). (This is why I think Peter Watts is so popular on LW—the idea that you can just tinker with circuitry and upgrade people.
Psychologists are the most ‘gentle’, they and the doctors have too much ‘social responsibilities’ baked in to comfortably discuss people as walking meat. Botanists (like me) don’t have enough knowledge to do it, but we at least are aware of this. Biochemists are narrow-minded by necessity (too many pathways). Vertebrate zoologists are best (Steinbeck, I think, described it in his book about the Sea of Cortes), in that you can count on them to be brutally consistent. Physicists—at least the one I know—like to talk about ‘open systems’ and such, but they (he) could just as plausibly speak about some totally contrived aliens.
I know it is dishonest to ask LW-ers to spend time on studying exactly human anatomy, but even a thorough look at some skeleton should give you a vibe of how defined human bodies are. There are ridges on the bones. There are seams. Try to draw them, to internalize the feeling.
I’m sorry for the cavalier assuming of ignorance, but I think at least some of you can benefit from my words.
I am not sure what exactly you wanted to say. All I got from reading it is: “human anatomy is complicated, non-biologists hugely underestimate this, modifying the anatomy of human brain would be incredibly difficult”.
I am not what is the relation to the following part (which doesn’t speak about modifying the anatomy of human brain):
It felt implied that ‘rationality’ was a culture of either hacking humanity, or patching together the best practices accumulated in the past
Are you suggesting that for increasing rationality, using “best practices” will be not enough, changes in anatomy of human brain will be required (and we underestimate how difficult it will be)? Or something else?
That, and that those changes in the brain might lead to other changes not associated with intelligence at all. Like sleep requirements, haemorrages or fluctuations in blood pressure in the skull, food cravings, etc. Things that belong to physiology and are freely discussed by a much narrower circle of people, in part because even among biologists many people don’t like the organismal level of discussion, and doctors are too concerned with not doing harm to consider radical transformations.
Currently, ‘rationality’ is seen (by me) as a mix of nurturing one’s ability to act given the current limitations AND counting on vastly lessened limitations in the future, with some vague hopes of adapting the brain to perform better, but the basis of the hopes seems (to me) unestablished.
I know it is dishonest to ask LW-ers to spend time on studying exactly human anatomy, but even a thorough look at some skeleton should give you a vibe of how defined human bodies are.
I see three lines of addressing this concern: 1) Anatomy was over a long time under strong evolutionary pressure. Human intelligence is a fairly recent phenomena of the last 100,000 years. It’s a mess that’s not as well ordered as anatomy. 2) Individual humans deviate more from the textbook anatomy than you would guess by reading the textbook. 3) The brain seems to be build out of basic modules that easily allow it to add an additional color if you edit the DNA in the eye via gene therapy. People with implented magnets can feel magnetic fields. It’s modules allow us to learn complex mental tasks like reading texts which is very far from what we evolved to do.
Also, human intelligence has been evolving exactly as long as human anatomy, it simply leaped forward recently in ways we can notice. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been under strong evolutionary pressure before. I would say that until humans learned to use tools, the pressure on an individual human had had to be stronger.
Also, human intelligence has been evolving exactly as long as human anatomy, it simply leaped forward recently in ways we can notice.
I don’t think that reflects reality. Our anatomy isn’t as different from chimpanzee’s as our minds. Most people hear voices in their head that say stuff to them. Chimpanzee’s don’t have language to do something similar.
I’m not saying otherwise! I’m saying that the formulation has little sense either way. Compare: ‘there is little observed variation in anatomy between apes in broad sense because the evolutionary pressure constraining anatomical changes is too great to allow much viable variation’, ‘there is little observed variation in anatomy …, but not in intelligence, because further evolution of intelligence allows for greater success and so younger branches are more intelligent and better at survival’, ‘only change in anatomy drives change in intelligence, so apparently there was some great hack which translated small changes in anatomy to lead to great changes in intelligence’, ‘chimpanzees never tell us about the voices they hear’...
There are million of years invested into the task about how to move with legs. There’s not millions of years invested into the task of how brains best deal with language.
I think adding lanugage produced something like a quantum leap for the mind and that there’s no similar quantum leap for other organ’s like the human heart.
The quantum leap means that other parts have to adapt and optimize for now language being a major factor.
You could look at IQ.
The mental difference between a human at IQ 70 and a human at IQ 130 is vast. Intelligence is also highly heritable. With a few hundred thousand years and a decent amount of evolutionary pressure on stronger intelligence you wouldn’t have many low IQ people anymore.
And yet textbook anatomy is my best guess about a body when I haven’t seen it, and all deviations are describable compared to it. What I object to is the norm of treating phenomenology, such as the observations about magnets and eye color, as more-or-less solid background for predictions about the future. If we discuss, say, artificial new brain modules, that’s fine by me as long as I keep in mind the potential problems with cranial pressure fluctuations, the need to establish interconnections with other neurons—in some very ordered fashion, building blood vessels to feed it, changes in glucose consumption, even the possibility of your children cgoosing to have completely different artificial modules than you, to the point that heritability becomes obsolete, etc. I am not a specialist to talk about it. I have low priors on anybody here pointing me to The Literature were I to ask.
I think seeing at least the bones and then trying to gauge the distance to what experimental interference one considers possible would be a good thing to happen.
A side note.
My mother is a psychologist, father—an applied physicist, aunt 1 - a former morgue cytologist, aunt 2 - a practicing ultrasound specialist, father-in-law—a general practitioner, husband—a biochemist, my friends (c. 5) are biologists, and most of my immediate coworkers teach either chemistry or biology. (Occasionally I talk to other people, too.) I’m mentioning this to describe the scope of my experience with how they come to terms with the ‘animal part’ of the human being; when I started reading LW I felt immediately that people here come from different backgrounds. It felt implied that ‘rationality’ was a culture of either hacking humanity, or patching together the best practices accumulated in the past (or even just adopting the past), because clearly, we are held back by social constraints—if we weren’t, we’d be able to fully realize our winning potential. (I’m strawmanning a bit, yes.) For a while I ignored the voice in the back of my mind that kept mumbling ‘inferential distances between the dreams of these people and the underlying wetware are too great for you to estimate’, or some such, but I don’t want to anymore.
To put it simply, there is a marked difference within biologists in how reverently they view the gross (and fine) human anatomy, in how easily they accept that a body is just a thing, composed of matter, with charges and insulation and stuff -just a system of tubes, but still not a car in which you can individually tweak the axles and the windshield (probably). (This is why I think Peter Watts is so popular on LW—the idea that you can just tinker with circuitry and upgrade people.
Psychologists are the most ‘gentle’, they and the doctors have too much ‘social responsibilities’ baked in to comfortably discuss people as walking meat. Botanists (like me) don’t have enough knowledge to do it, but we at least are aware of this. Biochemists are narrow-minded by necessity (too many pathways). Vertebrate zoologists are best (Steinbeck, I think, described it in his book about the Sea of Cortes), in that you can count on them to be brutally consistent. Physicists—at least the one I know—like to talk about ‘open systems’ and such, but they (he) could just as plausibly speak about some totally contrived aliens.
I know it is dishonest to ask LW-ers to spend time on studying exactly human anatomy, but even a thorough look at some skeleton should give you a vibe of how defined human bodies are. There are ridges on the bones. There are seams. Try to draw them, to internalize the feeling.
I’m sorry for the cavalier assuming of ignorance, but I think at least some of you can benefit from my words.
I am not sure what exactly you wanted to say. All I got from reading it is: “human anatomy is complicated, non-biologists hugely underestimate this, modifying the anatomy of human brain would be incredibly difficult”.
I am not what is the relation to the following part (which doesn’t speak about modifying the anatomy of human brain):
Are you suggesting that for increasing rationality, using “best practices” will be not enough, changes in anatomy of human brain will be required (and we underestimate how difficult it will be)? Or something else?
I read Romashka as saying that the clean separation between the hardware and the software does not work for humans. Humans are wetware which is both.
That, and that those changes in the brain might lead to other changes not associated with intelligence at all. Like sleep requirements, haemorrages or fluctuations in blood pressure in the skull, food cravings, etc. Things that belong to physiology and are freely discussed by a much narrower circle of people, in part because even among biologists many people don’t like the organismal level of discussion, and doctors are too concerned with not doing harm to consider radical transformations.
Currently, ‘rationality’ is seen (by me) as a mix of nurturing one’s ability to act given the current limitations AND counting on vastly lessened limitations in the future, with some vague hopes of adapting the brain to perform better, but the basis of the hopes seems (to me) unestablished.
That’s also more or less how I see it. I am not planning to perform a brain surgery on myself in the near future. :D
The XKCD for it: DNA (or “Biology is largely solved”): https://xkcd.com/1605/
I see three lines of addressing this concern:
1) Anatomy was over a long time under strong evolutionary pressure. Human intelligence is a fairly recent phenomena of the last 100,000 years. It’s a mess that’s not as well ordered as anatomy.
2) Individual humans deviate more from the textbook anatomy than you would guess by reading the textbook.
3) The brain seems to be build out of basic modules that easily allow it to add an additional color if you edit the DNA in the eye via gene therapy. People with implented magnets can feel magnetic fields. It’s modules allow us to learn complex mental tasks like reading texts which is very far from what we evolved to do.
Also, human intelligence has been evolving exactly as long as human anatomy, it simply leaped forward recently in ways we can notice. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been under strong evolutionary pressure before. I would say that until humans learned to use tools, the pressure on an individual human had had to be stronger.
I don’t think that reflects reality. Our anatomy isn’t as different from chimpanzee’s as our minds. Most people hear voices in their head that say stuff to them. Chimpanzee’s don’t have language to do something similar.
I’m not saying otherwise! I’m saying that the formulation has little sense either way. Compare: ‘there is little observed variation in anatomy between apes in broad sense because the evolutionary pressure constraining anatomical changes is too great to allow much viable variation’, ‘there is little observed variation in anatomy …, but not in intelligence, because further evolution of intelligence allows for greater success and so younger branches are more intelligent and better at survival’, ‘only change in anatomy drives change in intelligence, so apparently there was some great hack which translated small changes in anatomy to lead to great changes in intelligence’, ‘chimpanzees never tell us about the voices they hear’...
There are million of years invested into the task about how to move with legs. There’s not millions of years invested into the task of how brains best deal with language.
What do you understand as evolution of the mind, then, and how is it related to that of organs?
I think adding lanugage produced something like a quantum leap for the mind and that there’s no similar quantum leap for other organ’s like the human heart. The quantum leap means that other parts have to adapt and optimize for now language being a major factor.
You could look at IQ.
The mental difference between a human at IQ 70 and a human at IQ 130 is vast. Intelligence is also highly heritable. With a few hundred thousand years and a decent amount of evolutionary pressure on stronger intelligence you wouldn’t have many low IQ people anymore.
And yet textbook anatomy is my best guess about a body when I haven’t seen it, and all deviations are describable compared to it. What I object to is the norm of treating phenomenology, such as the observations about magnets and eye color, as more-or-less solid background for predictions about the future. If we discuss, say, artificial new brain modules, that’s fine by me as long as I keep in mind the potential problems with cranial pressure fluctuations, the need to establish interconnections with other neurons—in some very ordered fashion, building blood vessels to feed it, changes in glucose consumption, even the possibility of your children cgoosing to have completely different artificial modules than you, to the point that heritability becomes obsolete, etc. I am not a specialist to talk about it. I have low priors on anybody here pointing me to The Literature were I to ask.
I think seeing at least the bones and then trying to gauge the distance to what experimental interference one considers possible would be a good thing to happen.