Another level beyond the human mind?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Intelligence and consciousness are emergent in nature. In this regard, I think it’s extraordinarily difficult to understand one level from a different one, particularly moving upward. In this regard, let’s expand on the example in the OP of talking to a dog. From our perspective, we do a lot to give human traits to dogs in our minds; that is, we assume certain cognitive and emotional responses to stimuli that just aren’t there. And from the dog’s perspective, it’s not that he just can’t, in the way an unintelligent and/or uninformed person might not be able to, but he can’t even grasp the concept of having such a conversation. I might guess that a dog has some concept of the idea that we have aspects that are beyond him, but all he can do is relate it to his own experiences, and so humans just fall into the role of alpha as the closest they can get.

In this regard, we know there are some things that are beyond us, like perhaps actually grasping a fourth spatial dimension, seeing outside the visible light spectrum, hearing outside the typical range, an ability to sense electromagnetic fields, etc. But that’s not intelligence, that’s just a different set of senses that connect us to the world. I think we’d see that an intelligence that is at least one whole level beyond us would be, at best, on the very edge of our ability to understand what it is they’re able to do that we’re not, and quite possibly just straight up beyond us.

But as someone mentioned upthread, I think there’s at least one more level, and it is the idea of the connected human mind. Compare to hive animals like bees and ants. An individual member of the colony isn’t able to do anything remarkable compared to other insects of similar complexity, but when you put the colony together, it’s able to perform remarkably complex behavior, and this behavior is fully beyond the understanding of any one member, it only knows it’s particular role. In fact, there’s some behaviors that colony animals are able to perform that we can’t even understand; for instance, I recall reading that research had shown that bees are able to solve TSP in a more efficient way than we’ve been able to figure out with modern computers.

So, what if the next level is what we’re approaching now with the use of the internet, social media, and similar technologies in the future. What if we’re able to combine the minds of hundreds, thousands, or millions of minds in a way to solve problems as far beyond that of a single human mind as the sorts of problems a hive solves that are beyond a single member. We already have the concept of the technological singularity, what if there’s something similar to that with consciousness and intelligence, perhaps tied to technology, and it only appears as a singularity because it’s beyond our current ability to understand.

So, sure, I’m reasonably certain there’s at least one more level of intelligence and consciousness beyond us. I’m also reasonably certain that if there’s any sort of interstellar or even intergallactic race of aliens out there, they’re probably at that level or beyond. Maybe that’s also part of why it seems so far beyond us, precisely because that sort of problem is beyond the ability of a single human mind or even a group of human minds to solve, but might be solvable when we’re able to think and operate at a higher level.

22

Thanks for the answers everyone!

That reminds me of a scene in ‘The Cassini Division’ (I believe) by Ken MacLeod (of the clan MacLeod) where the human heroine is communicating from orbit with incredibly advanced post-human entities deep in the interior of Jupiter. They are presenting on screen as blandly attractive human forms and the conversation is going fine when she suddenly realises with a chill that there is no time-delay between her comments and the reply, as there should be given the distances involved, the post-humans are analysing and predicting the course of the conversation and what she is going to say before she actually says it.

Good book actually.

23

I’ve often thought about what it would be like to interact with aliens that are to human beings what human beings are to dogs. That is, creatures that are recognizably “like us”, with the same sorts of animal needs and drives, that we could interact with in a socially meaningful way, but who can do things that we just couldn’t understand.

Dogs spend a lot of time around humans just ignoring the bizarre stuff we get up to. They understand eating, and running, and playing, and hanging out, and cuddling, and sex, and sleeping, and chasing stuff. But other stuff is just magic, or incomprehensible.

I mean, they know we talk, but to them talking is just like the far side cartoon of “hey, hey, hey”. They understand that different vocalizations mean different things, just like barking and whining and yipping and growling and howling and sighing all mean different things. But they think that’s all we’re doing–making noises with emotional content. They don’t understand the semantic content of the noises. And they don’t understand tools, or how to use them.

But the thing is, we can imagine these hyperintelligent aliens, who are kind of like us in some ways, but we can’t imagine what their hyperintelligence would be like, because if we could it wouldn’t be hyperintelligence, it would be just plain old “really smart”.

On the other hand, it seems to me more likely that aliens won’t be hyperintelligent, just off in left field, like dolphins. Dolphins can do stuff we just flat out can’t do, like sonar and three dimensional navigation. But intelligence in real-world creatures has to have evolved to solve problems that the real-world creature has to solve. And if we’re designing intelligences how do we stuff them with capabilities that we can’t understand? It’s one thing to solve arithmetic problems instantly, that’s something humans can understand even though we can’t do it. It’s another to do things we can’t understand, because if we can’t understand it, then, you know, we can’t understand it.

So a lot of the things hyperintelligent aliens do are going to seem stupid to us, just like a lot of the stuff we do seems really dumb to dogs. And when what we do seems smart to dogs, it’s often done for reasons they can’t understand. They think we’re going out to patrol our territory, we think we’re exercising to burn off that extra doughnut we ate in the break room this morning.

24

Actually I think it is 12, not, 16. (It varies between different species of mantis shrimp, but I think 12 is the max.)Anyway, the mantis shrimp can actually can actually discriminate far fewer colors than we can. Probably just those 12, but not shades in between.

Webcomix are not a good place to get your scientific information.

25

I think that, like in computation, there’s a threshold effect beyond which every advance in intelligence can only be quantitative, but not qualitative. Basically, that threshold is being able to engage in arbitrary, open-ended symbol manipulation: if we’re capable of that, there is no computation that we can’t in principle perform; and if the world is such that its physics only allows computable processes, then we can indeed, in principle, understand everything about it, as we can effectively recapitulate the processes that occur in the world within our minds.

Of course, our conscious minds are relatively poor computers; but with the ability of universal symbol manipulation, we also have the capability of extending it arbitrarily—most simply with pen and paper, or with exterior computing devices.

So we are qualitatively smarter than dogs, or all other animals; but, if there is no exotic physics that allows hypercomputation, we’re also qualitatively as smart as it is possible to be. Of course, we can be exceeded quantitatively; but that just means that there are resources out there of which we can avail ourselves such that we can extend our own reasoning capacities quantitatively.

And so far, prospects for physical hypercomputation look very slim: generally, hypercomptuation is thought to be a supertask, that is, a task that requires performing infinitely many subtasks in a finite time, which is strongly believed to be impossible. Certainly, every concrete scheme so far proposed is unphysical: depending either on measuring a real number to infinite precision, or on literally carrying out infinitely many operations, or something like that.

So if our universe prohibits hypercomputation, then we are qualitatively as intelligent as it is possible to be. (A slight caveat is given by the possibility of quantum computation: a quantum computer can perform certain operations significantly faster than any known classical computer, and thus, may make some computations feasible that classically aren’t, even with all the resources available in the universe; nevertheless, the set of things a quantum computer can compute is the same as the set of things a classical computer can compute, so I would consider this to be a quantitative advantage, as well.)

Besides, if the universe is computable, then we also have a nice explanation of why it can be so elegantly described mathematically, since this description is then effectively just a simulation of the universe’s real dynamics.

26

Another factor : a straightforward estimate of reasonable human brain emulation performance, based on eliminating known delays and inefficiencies in the human brain, results in about a 1 million fold speedup.

This would be a being that, hypothetically, is just a human being who is emulated. So qualitatively they are no smarter than you and I - they just have 1 million times the amount of relative time to accomplish any cognitive task.

Even with this relatively conservative speedup, you’d have a being that could singlehandedly rewrite all human software in a few months or design a wide body jetliner over a weekend.

Of course, realistically, even if they still had a human cognitive structure, they could meld in countless software tools that would step in to boost the efficiency of their thinking. If an ordinary human tried to communicate with a being like this, it would probably qualitatively seem like talking to a god.

27

Well I think it is the dolphin brain, all they do all day is fish, f$%K and sleep. Smarter than us.

28

Don’t forget “muck about in the water having a good time”.

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[QUOTE=Lemur866]
I’ve often thought about what it would be like to interact with aliens that are to human beings what human beings are to dogs.
[/QUOTE]

I suspect that it would be very much like the way aliens / advanced AI interact with humans in films like The Matrix, Dark City, Oblivion and similar films / stories. Basically, their technology and knowledge would be so far in advance of our own, that they could essentially define our reality without us even being aware of it. Much in the same way we might define reality for ants in a glass ant farm.