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Comment by Izkata | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure we already have one answer to the paradox: the dinosaurs, and how long they were around without any sort of civilization. Simply reaching intelligence has got to be one of the great filters.

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It's hard to truly grok just how long the dinosaurs were around. It's easy to say that, had life not almost been wiped out by an asteroid things would have worked out differently, but the dinosaurs had something like 200 million years and there's no evidence they developed anything approaching human-like intelligence.

You're saying that like humans (well, evolutionary predescesors) weren't around and evolving over that period as well.

They were, but mammals at that time were pretty simple and weren't doing that well against their dinosaur competitors. When the asteroid took out most of the dinosaurs, that's when mammalian life really took off, because they were able to survive the many years of lack of sunlight that ensued.

What would such evidence look like? I don't think we can consider brain size definitive, since it's possible for humans with about ~10% of our normal brain volume to function normally. There seems to be no evidence for tool use, much less advanced technology, but again, what would these even look like after so many millions of years? I think about all we can say is that no prior species changed the planet in the same fashion we have.

> It's hard to truly grok just how long the dinosaurs were around.

One of the crazier things I've heard recently is that the time between the present and the Tyrannosaurus Rex [1] (68-66 million years) is less than the time between the T-Rex and the Brontosaurus [2] (156-147 million years ago, or 79 million years before the T-Rex).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannosaurus

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brontosaurus

However, there are quite a few other species still around which are pretty intelligent (elephants, other great apes, whales and dolphins, octopi) so the development of intelligence may not be all that rare.

But none of them have the ability to pass learned knowledge through many generations the way that we can. For most species, what a mom can teach a kid is very limited, and special skills tend to be static between generations as opposed to continually building on each other

Dolphin teach skills across multiple generations. They don't have any real way to build civilizations or technology though.

Really on it's own intelligence does not change much. You need both long term food storage and fire to really advance.

Opposable thumbs help an awful lot, too.

Several other species have opposable thumbs[1], and many mammals have elaborate long-term food storage. Other apes have been observed hunting with spears; basket making and song are also practiced by birds; cetaceans might have more advanced spoken language; sweat and bipedalism aren't common but aren't unique; etc.

But no other (non-extinct) species can start a fire.

1. https://srfoundation.blogspot.com/2009/01/other-animals-with...

Human language is somewhat unique in that it can describe multitude of future outcomes, not just a present state of things. Turing complete if you will. This is a bit of a wild idea I have anyway, don’t judge me harshly. :)

How do you know that about the communication of other animals? Or is it just an assumption?

I’ve been hanging around with linguists, this idea sort of emerged from my eavesdropping.

In particular it’s accepted in the field (I believe) that animal languages are not generative, which is to say they do not provide for production of new forms over time. Anything an animal speakes has already been spoken before because the possible set of valid sentences is strangled by lack of variability in the syntax. Intuitively, and this is where I’m going off the rails, I feel that generativity and Turing-completeness are near the same thing - they can describe something that is yet to be. Non generative language can only describe what has already been. That is constructing a new world requires description of the machinery operating that new world, whereas describing an old world you can lean on prior knowledge of the speaker and make do with a much poorer descriptive facility.

https://hubpages.com/education/Language-A-Brief-Treatment

I am sort of a hobby linguist, though I do have some years of formal linguistics (and computational linguistics) education, which is why I was interested in your wild idea and how it relates to animal language. Are you using the term "generative" to describe your own specific meaning here? I'm asking because the term "generative" has a pretty specific definition in linguistics, and I have heard it used fairly loosely by some, but never in this way. And while I think your idea is interesting, I also think it is picking nits here. That animal language lacks some feature of human language doesn't make it any less true that humans and other animals both use language. I think this would be similar to saying that because animals don't build defensive positions that they aren't actually conducting warfare, and defensive positions are what make human warfare truly unique and thus humans differentiated in the animal kingdom. Purpose-built defensive positions are as fundamental to the most basic definition of warfare, as I am thinking this feature of language you describe is to the most basic definition of language. But nobody would say that chimpanzees do not conduct warfare. And so I would say that because animal language lacks a complex grammar that isn't a language. If that makes sense.

Generative not in the sense of generative grammar but in the sense described here https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapt...

There was a linguist who brought up those five key attributes of human language as being crucial, I can’t find his name right now :(

And I did not say that animals don’t use language. Or did I?

What I mean to say is that there is a dramatic difference in expressive power, in particular in being able to convey a plan of action. Animal language can convey “there is a tiger south-south-west 15 meters, run for your life”. But it can’t express “if there is a tiger run left, if there are two tigers run to the right” unless the animals have previously encountered that situation and survived unwittingly executing this plan of action.

To me this is akin to the difference between Turing complete and subturing languages, in that the expresssive power is so very different.

Link?

Do the skills get more advanced with each generation?

http://www.wilddolphinproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11...

Note it's not unique to dolphin as some cat species for example are known to bring back wounded prey for their young to practice with.

This is not true. Non-human animal populations exist in which specialized, learned skills (mostly around hunting food) are taught to new generations.

Elephants, whales, octopi, etc didn't develop their intelligence independently from humans. We're all pretty closely related species that evolved from the same origins.

What would be interesting is if we found intelligent (or any!) life that evolved completely independently from our own origins.

In the great scheme of things we're related to octopuses, but not nearly as closely as other mammals. Also birds, the direct descendents of the dinosaurs and more distantly related to us, can be incredibly intelligent. See toolmaking in crows for example.

> octopi [...] didn't develop their intelligence independently from humans.

Are you sure?I seem to recall watching random youtube videos a few weeks / months back and saw something on octopi I vaguely recall it saying they developed intelligence differently. Although probably I have got it muddled with something else :)

The common ancestor between humans and cephalopods was around 560 mya, which isn've that closely related, and this would have been before the common ancestor developed a sophisticated nervous system.

But we are related. We have the same origins and some of the same DNA. Intelligence may have arisen independently in Octopi compared to humans, but the conditions and building blocks that made it possible were shared. All life on Earth shares a common ancestry.

Exactly. And the coming of humans as a dominant specie on Earth is pretty much coincidental (humans faced extinction several times, that we know) so there is absolutely no "fate" that leads to human-like intelligence.

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