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There's an interesting snippet in the beginning of the article: > A prominent example is our colleague Jesse Prinz at the City University of New York, who argu
by SCHiM 8y ago
There's an interesting snippet in the beginning of the article:
> A prominent example is our colleague Jesse Prinz at the City University of New York, who argues forcefully for what is referred to as a ‘nurturist’ (as opposed to a ‘naturist’) position in his book Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind
I've read a bunch of books on prehistory, one thing that always stood out to me as very telling is that for a long time, homo sapiens were just like all the other humans on the planet. Reasonably smart, we had tools, rudimentary language and brains equipped to maintain reasonably stable social contacts on a small scale.
Then 70k years ago things suddenly changed, sapiens left Africa and rapidly spread to the other continents. There's not much evidence of actual warfare, but the arrival of sapiens in all cases coincided with the extinction of other humans and mega fauna.
The author of "Sapiens" argues that this happened because of sapiens' massively increased ability to cooperate. When and why did this happen 70k years ago? Because, so argues "Sapiens", a sudden mutation (or gradual crossing of a certain threshold) enabled our ancestors to construct 'culture'. Our increased mastery of language and our evolved social modules allowed a more robust societal framework to come into existence. Enabling rapid buildup and accumulation of technology and tradition. And that was ultimately what made us 'different' from the other humans on the planet.
I found it a very compelling argument (even though, ultimately, it's only a thought experiment). Maybe we do inherit a 'spray-painted wall of human nature'. But our culture and history seem to fill a function too.
- resu_nimda 8y agoI've long felt that intelligence is a property of the group rather than the individual. Language is inextricably linked to our conception of intelligence, and having someone to talk to is a prerequisite. I feel like this is very important and seems to be missed in modern AI research. I think of most of today's systems as monoliths, lone individuals raised in isolation (receiving training data does not constitute communication/language development), forever stunted in all of the more "humanist" facets of intelligence. Is there research going into more "social" systems of multiple "actors" that are able to interact/communicate with each other? Perhaps even develop their own language, one that we might not be able to understand? (How would we even identify such a thing? Think of dolphins - we know something is going on there, but we haven't been able to translate it.)
- cbhl 8y agoI agree, the idea that "intelligence is a property of the group" is an interesting idea that is worth exploring further with respect to AI research. I think the indie puzzle platformer Thomas Was Alone explores this idea in a cute and approachable way. https://store.steampowered.com/app/220780/Thomas_Was_Alone/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/220780/Thomas_Was_Alone/ It's also worth noting that AlphaGo was trained against copies of itself in later stages of its development -- while this isn't "communication" in the human sense, it does enable copies of the AI to learn from each other. https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/alphago-vs-alphago-self-play-games/ https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/alphago-vs-alphago-sel...
- cbwilliams 8y agoCertainly during childhood and adolescence. For grownups the situation is different though. Many, if not most, works that I admire have been created by reclusive individuals. A lot of groups just form around a small number of productive individuals and then claim ownership and promote the ideas of such individuals.
- vowelless 8y agoThere is also the population bottleneck theory about the Toba eruption 75.000 years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
- nickparker 8y agoThe Toba eruption leans heavily toward the 'interesting thought experiment' category as well at this point though. I'm in a paleoclimatology class right now and we spent a couple weeks on it. The John Hawks post[0] cited under #Criticism on Wikipedia is a pretty good summary of the current research as I understand it. The short argument against it is that the genetic signature corresponds to either an extremely tight short bottleneck, ie all living humans are descended from a group of <1000 which lived through Toba, or a looser bottleneck (tens of thousands of humans) which lasted centuries. The tight bottleneck version requires almost all of Earth to have become briefly uninhabitable which strains belief since we've found several sites which were a-ok throughout, and the loose version is unworkable because Toba didn't have centuries long effects. http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/climate/toba-bottleneck-didnt-happen-2018.html http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/climate/toba-bottleneck-...
- ak39 8y agoThank you for this! Fascinating. I’m curious ... 74000 years ago ... if we took a time machine and snatched a human child from that time and raised it today, would it be indistinguishable from a modern human? (Could I teach it - and it understand - functional programming?)
- tim333 8y ago>Could I teach it - and it understand - functional programming? Probably yes you could. The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians branched out of Africa around then. https://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/22/asia/indigenous-australians-earths-oldest-civilization/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/22/asia/indigenous-australia...
- danieltillett 8y agoYou don't need anything fancy like culture to explain the rise of East African humans, just food will do it. My Neanderthal ancestors required something like double the number of calories to survive that my East African ancestors needed.