Comment by gnarlouse

Comment by gnarlouse 11 hours ago

2 replies

This article has me thinking about “the human capacity to outthink nature and the scalability of this.” The wheel is sort of the first time I think man outthought nature: Nature is inherently bumpy and noisy, rolling is certainly a great form of locomotion, but it’s not reliable. When man figured out how to make long tracts of flat land (roads), we outthought nature. In some sense you could argue that our entire tranjectory through science and technology, supported by the scientific method, is another example: nature sort of sucks at persisting high level pattern intuition between one generation to the next, basically anything beyond genes.

I keep going back and forth on whether I think “super-intelligence” is achievable in any form other than speed-super-intelligence, but I definitely think that being able to think 3-dimensionally capably will be a major building block to AI outthinking man, and outthinking nature.

Sort of a shitpost.

djtango 11 hours ago

The human body is an organised system of cells contributing to a greater whole - is there much difference between blood vessels designed for the efficient transport of key resources and messengers across the body and roads that carry key resources and messengers across a landmass?

In that sense has nature just replicated its ability to organise but at the species level on a planetary (interplanetary soon) scale?

Why are humans above nature...?

  • gnarlouse 9 hours ago

    Fair, i mean i also love the argument that there’s really no difference between “the manmade world” and “the natural world”because the former is entirely composed of parts stripped from or chemically altered from the latter. So yes, nature has absolutely replicated its ability to organize at a species level through human ingenuity.

    Humans are maybe separate from nature primarily on the basis of our attempts (of varying success) to steer, structure, and optimize the organization of nature around us, and knowing how to do so is not an explicit aspect of reality, or at least did not make itself known to early humans so it’s reasonable to believe it’s not explicit. By that, I mean you’re not born with any inherent knowledge of the inner workings of quantum gravity, or of the navies stokes equation, or any of the tooling that supports it, but clearly these models exist and evolve tangibly around us in every moment. We found something nature hid from DNA-based biological tree of life, and exploited it to great effect.

    Again, this is a colossal shitpost.