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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

I'm baffled that we don't spend more time trying to understand sentience on earth. There's so much of it, it's so clearly intelligent, and it would be so useful for SETI etc.

But for some reason there's a bias towards assuming that "intelligent" means "can do differential equations" - which doesn't even apply to most humans.

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> baffled that we don't spend more time trying to understand sentience on earth

Accidentally Ted Chiang [1].

[1] https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510/

Since the Enlightenment, it has mainly been our use of language that underpinned humans' purported uniqueness. Prior to that, it was religion.

LLMs will be a challenge to the sense of entitlement which derives from this so-called uniqueness. I suspect another attempt to move those goal-posts is imminent.

>> I'm baffled that we don't spend more time trying to understand sentience on earth

I wonder whether there exists enough tagged big data to train an LLM on any non-human language. If not, chat apps like this parrot app could be a step in the right direction.

We're only looking for extraterrestrial intelligence because we secretly like to think that we're unique in the universe.

Isn't it one of those things that's potentially useful for further research... but doesn't really have an apparent practical application? unfortunately we tend to prioritize things by what they can produce

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