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Large brains are just tools. Great apes used sticks and rocks as tools to extend the use of their hands, and evolved larger/more powerful brains to extend their
by notquitesure 9y ago
Large brains are just tools. Great apes used sticks and rocks as tools to extend the use of their hands, and evolved larger/more powerful brains to extend their decision making and problem solving abilities. There isn't any real difference in the global impact of humans relative to that of great apes, because humans just have a more well developed versions of this particular tool.
Then again, the descendants of the apes that didn't develop the particular "tool" of generalizable problem solving are extinct or endangered, while the descendants of the ones that did are busy working to create AI
- sevensor 9y ago> Large brains are just tools That's an odd position to take. Surely there's a difference between the hand and what it grasps.
- notquitesure 9y agoThe difference is not between the hand and the tool it grasps, both of which apply force to manually manipulate the environment, but between the hand/tool and the mind that directs it. I agree that that is an odd position -- it's not one i hold, but a reductio of the "computers are tools no different than knives" argument above. machines that are able to process novel information and make decisions are fundamentally different from other machines, whether they are composed of tissue or silicon
- Sevii 9y agoYour dna is the hand in this metaphor.