To sloppily assign telos to evolution - humans are a failed experiment in making chimps too big and tall The "licensed software" we ran on for millions of years was for specific functions to take advantage of being bigger and taller - rock throwing, hitting things with sticks
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Overall, this experiment wasn't worth it Throwing things doesn't help that much The better vision and hardwired math engine and whatnot is incredibly costly to run, we eat too much, we take to long to grow up Too many chips on a motherboard that can't support it, a mistake
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I mean lots and lots of our hominid ancestors died because they're less efficient than chimps We almost died We eventually made it because of that random bootstrapping - the brain developing a true complete natural language, and with it abstraction
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Replying to @arthur_affect
arguably the key feature of humanity isn't abstract thought in some exalted sense, but the ability to cooperate, and especially /to do what you're told/
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Replying to @perdricof @arthur_affect
most other species, each new animal has to start learning the world from scratch, each time the thing about humans is, someone else can figure out how to do X, and then tell you, and you don't have to figure it out yourself or even really understand it you just do X now
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Replying to @perdricof @arthur_affect
which is to say, we can build up a body of socially-transmitted knowledge in ways that most other animals can't (yes, there are exceptions) what this translates to: we can build on the past faster than the rate of genetic evolution that other animals are locked to
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Replying to @perdricof
It all starts with language Like I think the hot take in ARRIVAL is correct, linguistics is the most foundational field of study, not physics Without language you literally can't know anything else
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof
So, animals don’t “know” anything? My dog does not have language but it can recognize patterns and adjust behavior accordingly
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Replying to @SlacksAndATie @perdricof
Well that's a great big philosophical question
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SlacksAndATie
well that's the point, right the key feature of language isn't that it lets you know things, it's that it lets you tell other people things that you know so yeah sure dogs know lots of stuff but they sure don't teach it very well
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They know a lot of things but do they KNOW that they know them
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Replying to @perdricof @SlacksAndATie
Don't make me bust out Wittgenstein, we'll be here all day
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