One of my big takeaways from reading GEB was that while higher-level semantics can emerge from any low-level symbolic substrate, the details of how that semanti

One of my big takeaways from reading GEB was that while higher-level semantics can emerge from any low-level symbolic substrate, the details of how that semantics emerges are not at all simple or obvious or “likely to happen by random chance”. Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene, published just a few years earlier, is the clearest exposition that I have read of how this process probably played out in terrestrial life: the “semantics” encoded by amino acid sequences correspond to a molecule/cell/organism’s likelihood of surviving and replicating. For all but the simplest and most ephemeral replicators, this generally means accurately predicting environmental conditions. General intelligence, then, would conceivably arise simply due to selection pressures pushing organisms to live in the broadest range of environments. In some sense, this process does sound more like an engineering problem, as the embodiment which “contains” the intelligence is probably not an optional component.