Somewhat contra Alex’s example of a tree, I am struck by the comprehensibility of biological organisms. If, before I knew any biology, you had told me only that (1) animals are mechanistic, (2) are in fact composed of trillions of microscopic machines, and (3) were the result of a search process like evolution, then the first time I looked at the inside of an animal I think I would have expected absolutely *nothing* that could be macroscopically understood. I would have expected a crazy mesh of magic material that operated at a level way outside my ability to understand without (impossibly) constructing a mental entire from the bottom up. And indeed, if animals had been designed through a one-shot unstructured search I think this is what they would be like.
In reality, of course, animals have macroscopic parts that can be partially understood. There’s a tube food passes through, with multiple food-processing organs attached. There are bones for structure, muscles to pull, and tendons to transmit that force. And the main computation for directing the animal on large scales takes place in a central location (the brain).
We can tell and understand a post-hoc story about why the animal works, as a machine, and it’s sorta right. That animals have a strong amount of design, making this is possible, seems to be related to the iterated search-and-evaluate process that evolution used; it was not one-shot unstructured search.
At the least, this suggest that if search vs. design identifies a good dichotomy or a good axis, it is an axis/dichotomy that is fundamental, and arises way before human-level intelligence.
+1. It’s hard to remember how surprised I’d be to see reality for the first time, but it is shocking to look inside a biological creature and have a sense of “oh yeah, I have some sense of how many of these things connect together”. I’d expect things to look more like they do in weird sci-fi like “Annihilation” or something.
Although I remember people didn’t get basic stuff like what the brain was for for ages, so maybe it did look insane as well.
I think I only sort of agree with this. There does seem to be some level (macroscopic organs) at which biology makes tons of sense and is relatively immediately understandable. But I get the impression that once you start trying to understand the thing more specifically, and critically, actually do anything in the domains of biology, like medicine or nutrition, you pretty quickly hit a massive wall of non-understandability. My impression is that most medicine is virtually just randomly trying stuff and rolling with what seems to have non-zero benefit and statistically negligible harm. (This post is an elaborated opinion on this.)
Another example is in understanding how the mind/brain works. We now have an absolutely wild amount of data about how the brain is structured, but on an actual day-to-day operating level, we are barely able to do better than the ancient Greeks.
Is that also proportional to its complexity? Like, I’m guessing it’s harder to understand the internal structure of the things that don’t actually have many features.
Somewhat contra Alex’s example of a tree, I am struck by the comprehensibility of biological organisms. If, before I knew any biology, you had told me only that (1) animals are mechanistic, (2) are in fact composed of trillions of microscopic machines, and (3) were the result of a search process like evolution, then the first time I looked at the inside of an animal I think I would have expected absolutely *nothing* that could be macroscopically understood. I would have expected a crazy mesh of magic material that operated at a level way outside my ability to understand without (impossibly) constructing a mental entire from the bottom up. And indeed, if animals had been designed through a one-shot unstructured search I think this is what they would be like.
In reality, of course, animals have macroscopic parts that can be partially understood. There’s a tube food passes through, with multiple food-processing organs attached. There are bones for structure, muscles to pull, and tendons to transmit that force. And the main computation for directing the animal on large scales takes place in a central location (the brain).
We can tell and understand a post-hoc story about why the animal works, as a machine, and it’s sorta right. That animals have a strong amount of design, making this is possible, seems to be related to the iterated search-and-evaluate process that evolution used; it was not one-shot unstructured search.
At the least, this suggest that if search vs. design identifies a good dichotomy or a good axis, it is an axis/dichotomy that is fundamental, and arises way before human-level intelligence.
+1. It’s hard to remember how surprised I’d be to see reality for the first time, but it is shocking to look inside a biological creature and have a sense of “oh yeah, I have some sense of how many of these things connect together”. I’d expect things to look more like they do in weird sci-fi like “Annihilation” or something.
Although I remember people didn’t get basic stuff like what the brain was for for ages, so maybe it did look insane as well.
I think I only sort of agree with this. There does seem to be some level (macroscopic organs) at which biology makes tons of sense and is relatively immediately understandable. But I get the impression that once you start trying to understand the thing more specifically, and critically, actually do anything in the domains of biology, like medicine or nutrition, you pretty quickly hit a massive wall of non-understandability. My impression is that most medicine is virtually just randomly trying stuff and rolling with what seems to have non-zero benefit and statistically negligible harm. (This post is an elaborated opinion on this.)
Another example is in understanding how the mind/brain works. We now have an absolutely wild amount of data about how the brain is structured, but on an actual day-to-day operating level, we are barely able to do better than the ancient Greeks.
But a lot of that feeling depends on which animal’s insides you’re looking at.
A closely related mammal’s internal structure is a lot more intuitive to us than, say, an oyster or a jellyfish.
Is that also proportional to its complexity? Like, I’m guessing it’s harder to understand the internal structure of the things that don’t actually have many features.