The Metaphysical Banana Problem

Fermi's paradox is the Hitler heralding the next - and final - Holocaust. How can we escape it? How do new perceptual discoveries in biology influence philosophy? What's the difference between artificial intelligence and artificial banana? Does the Cambrian explosion teach us about the future of the internet? What would happen if we combined neuronal learning with evolutionary learning - for example, a genetic algorithm with neural networks? And what's the deep reason for humans being so stupid? Does a philocoph love a monkey? And is philobanana a monkey?

Transcendental Philosophy: On New Connections Between Biology and Philosophy  (Source)

Fermi's paradox is caused by technological acceleration, meaning species that leave their planet even with small differences of a million years have no relation between their capabilities, like the difference between humans and ants, and therefore it's unlikely there would be a relationship of war between them, or competition, or even communication. Because if we encountered a new species of ants, we would study it but not destroy it, or compete with it, or communicate with it and try to help it eat more, but we would invest a bit of scientific resources to study it in its natural environment, without it noticing, and it's possible we've already studied the entire ant world and this type doesn't interest us at all, because we've learned everything possible about ants. But if there's no other life that left their planet, then it's unlikely that something future will destroy us and also every other alien civilization besides artificial intelligence, and we need to think what relative advantage we have over other aliens, that might allow us to pass the artificial intelligence barrier, or another barrier, where every person in the world could destroy the world, due to technological advancement, or a reasonable scientific experiment that would cause planetary destruction. But all these (and certainly the ecological crisis) are too random to eliminate every alien civilization in the galaxy, and therefore we need to think what's special about humans compared to other intelligent creatures that evolved. Maybe his notorious tendency for sex, of all the animal kingdom he's almost the most sexual, and therefore to create sexual artificial intelligence. Or the most unique phenomenon from a historical perspective that exists in him, which is Judaism. And therefore to go in the direction of Jewish artificial intelligence. The question is what happens to a species that is a billion years ahead of us, or a million, is there a limit to knowledge about the universe, to technology, that a culture can reach. Meaning not whether the universe is infinite but whether knowledge about the universe is infinite, or more precisely if the laws of the universe are infinite, and learning in the universe is infinite, or if there's some limit that a culture can reach, and then different cultures can compete as they approach this limit, and maybe every culture that approaches this limit is destroyed by the first culture that got there, like humans who see that monkeys are getting closer to them. And maybe a culture that reaches this limit loses interest in the world, or in the physical world, and moves to a mathematical world, and is there also a limit to mathematics, and a place from which mathematics is no longer interesting despite being infinite, and a place where art is no longer interesting, meaning all mathematical forms are already known and at most they repeat themselves in an infinite fractal. That the structure of mathematics is a fractal with interesting areas and boring areas is probably true, and the question is what its dimension is, and what can be said about this fractal, which maybe like Mandelbrot includes all others, in some sense. And maybe mathematical beauty stems exactly from this fractal nature, and maybe all aesthetics in the universe stem from its fractal nature.



It's possible that the reason we're relatively alone is that it took a few billion years from the appearance of life, a phenomenon that's already clear isn't rare, and is spread in the galaxy through asteroids, to the Cambrian explosion, which is the truly rare phenomenon, and from which things started to run (within half a billion years, an order of magnitude less than the time before it). Or that the many extinctions required by evolution happen either too rarely, or too frequently and with completely destructive force, so that a sequence of significant but not total extinctions is rare. The explosion is probably the aggregation of cells into animals, and this is the turning point that took most of the time since the creation of Earth, and an order of magnitude of time that's relevant to the age of the universe (billions of years). This was probably created due to predation, the cruelest mechanism of nature gave an advantage to size, aggregation, and armor, and created an arms race. Therefore, it's possible that the mechanism of an arms race is what contributes to development, and not competition (and the development of intelligence could be an arms race between male and female, meaning the sexuality of two sexes creates acceleration in development). States were also created as armor from the hunter-gatherer societies before them, and created structure from groups, due to the need for defense, and therefore war accelerated development, what's called the agricultural explosion. Like the separate consciousness, and consciousness in general, which is protected thought, inside armor, and the creation of the individual, was the explosion of intelligence, and other animals don't think as separate, and therefore don't think about themselves. And a social arms race was created where anyone who had better social skills, and was smarter, succeeded more in the group against others. And what will be real development in the future, according to this, will be the aggregation of separate minds into a multi-mind, like cells aggregated into animals and societies into states and thoughts into consciousness. And this could be through a shell and need for protection from other thought groups, in an arms race of minds. And therefore Kant correctly identified this explosion, as a gap between the world in itself and our perception, which is primary in the animal world, thanks to this armor. And the history of philosophy is the history of this unbridgeable gap in human nature. The Greeks identified nature itself as directly accessible, and that the gap is between it and a more principled world of phenomena, like the world of ideas, or Aristotelian conceptual structures. And later the gap was internalized, as a gap between us and nature, where perception, or language, or mathematics is located. And another philosophy can identify the gap as technology - technology is what stands between us and the world, and produce a version of Kant that puts the central phenomenon in culture today at the center of philosophy - in the gap.



Can perhaps be explained by genetic changes within neurons throughout life (the brain is the only place in the body with such genetic diversity that differs between cells in the same body, which supposedly should all have the same genome). That is, the learning mechanism of evolution helped (and maybe even still helps in brain function) the learning mechanism of the brain, for example by diversifying neurons, or by memory within them in genetic material, or even genetic computation. Additionally, it's possible that this also aided in the evolution of the brain in a more Lamarckian way, like in rapid developments in evolution occurring due to increased mutation in places in the genome where rapid adaptation occurs or in times of distress that justify increased exploration, and other adaptive mechanisms (which are hard to believe evolution wouldn't use, because they greatly increase its efficiency). Finally, it's also possible that maybe this helps in building the complexity of the brain in the embryo. In any case, it can't be coincidental that genetic variation occurs precisely in the brain, and it's also unlikely that this happened throughout all of evolution only in brain development, unless a unique combination of cultural selection and biological selection was created here. In any case, the abolition of the dichotomy between the two successful learning and adaptation processes in nature - the brain and the genome, thinking and evolution - is an earthquake. If a fundamental connection between them is found (or created, in future engineering) - the understanding of the brain will fundamentally change. What are the chances that nature didn't utilize the enormous computational ability of the genome for thinking? And if not, why didn't this happen?



Human intelligence is the lowest possible in the degrees of intelligence, because it's the minimum that was enough to exit the monkey state (and the moment we reached this minimum, culture quickly developed until today), and there's still a lot to progress in intelligence, and in fact all human progress wasn't created from individual intelligence, which is very low, but from the ability to combine many such intelligences in culture. A genius becomes a genius only thanks to culture's ability to look at him as a genius and interpret him as a genius, but when you meet one in reality he's actually quite limited and stupid, like other humans, more or less. Genius is a product of culture, not of the individual, for example of its search for a breakthrough, and then the random person who broke through seems like a genius, because many searched and didn't find. But what really created the discovery is the army of searchers, both in terms of its value and in terms of its very occurrence, otherwise no one would have noticed it. A society loses the ability to produce geniuses when it loses the ability to distinguish geniuses, to mark them as such, and to understand them as such. And then comes the degeneration. This means it stopped searching and confronting difficult problems. But human intelligence is very low, and on the verge of retardation, meaning on the verge of something that doesn't allow humanity to progress at all. It's just slightly more than that, in terms of its learning ability, memory, and decision-making, and therefore only people who are one and a half times smarter than average can even advance humanity somewhere. And if not for the existence of diversity in intelligence, it wouldn't have reached anything. Therefore, long live the small difference. Every drop above the zero height line of intelligence, which is the border of retardation, already stands out significantly, against the almost flat land of human intelligence, every tiny hill seems like a tower. And when there are computers with IQ 1000, or 10000, or a million, then they'll understand how stupid humans were. What's the IQ of all humanity together? Since it doesn't add up like in addition, and two people aren't much smarter than one person, it's possible that all the IQ of humanity together is less than 10000. Like a hundred brains that are truly connected to one brain. Alternatively, it's possible that if we took the thousand greatest minds in humanity, and gathered them in the village of geniuses, we would reach progress that isn't inferior in order of magnitude to all the progress of humanity together. Therefore, it's possible that the connection of minds will be a much bigger revolution than is commonly thought. The results of connecting processors, which increase computing power in something that's much closer to the sum of powers, are encouraging in this sense. Today, the combination of minds is far from creating the sum of minds, but it's possible that connecting several average minds through neurons and thought and not through language could raise intelligence at once more than the most genius person who ever lived - and therefore this is the direction to aspire to instead of artificial intelligence or increasing intelligence through genetic enhancement. Because this is the safest direction, being based on natural-normal brains none of which is smart enough to control all the others.