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So a fun thing to try to think about is "What's missing from our intelligence?" Our brains may just be made up of lumps of neurons, but we can break out variou
by saalweachter 4y ago
So a fun thing to try to think about is "What's missing from our intelligence?"
Our brains may just be made up of lumps of neurons, but we can break out various capabilities we have:
* language
* tool use
* memory
* ability to think about hypothetical situations
* ability to think about abstract concepts
* theory of mind
We can think about what alien creatures or civilizations are like that lack them. A civilization without tool use, a civilization without language, a creature with no memory.
But thinking about capabilities we don't have is really hard, because, you know, if they exist, my brain isn't equipped to think about them.
I can think about having a perfect memory, or being able to think about N things in parallel, or being able to learn things by directly copying the information to my brain. Are those good enough to be new capabilities, or are they just minor variations of the capabilities I already have?
- anotherman554 4y agoIf you look at animals on earth, they just aren't curious about many of the things we are curious about. My cats for example don't find television interesting. Suppose there's some property of physics that looks like random noise to us (maybe like a TV looks like random noise to a cat) but to a different species they see it's something they can model and understand while our species just ignores it?
- withinboredom 4y agoYour cats don’t find the tv interesting because they can’t even see it. Their visual refresh rate is different enough from humans that they just see flashes of images (a refresh rate above 100hz is needed for cats to watch tv or see a screen, IIRC).
- anotherman554 4y agoI don't think making Youtube videos go at 4x speed will result in more interest from the cats, but I'll test it later. Of course the TV thing was just an example, cats don't pass the mirror test (If you put red dye on one part of their face they show no interest in how their face looks different when looking in a mirror).
- withinboredom 4y agoThe speed of the YouTube video doesn’t matter, it’s the refresh rate of the tv or monitor that matter. With a tube tv or older lcd screen, it just looks like a flashing gizmo.
- anotherman554 4y agoI have a 120 hz Oled Android TV. Unless Youtube drops frames speeding up a 30 FPS video 4x should hit 120 FPS. I've never heard of someone filming a video for cats in 4x slow motion and asking people to play it at 4x to entertain a cat, so I'm assuming this experiment has been tried and doesn't work, but I'll give it a shot. (It occurs to me I would need to confirm the Android Youtube app supports 120 FPS otherwise I'd need to play something through a PC).
- withinboredom 4y agoI’m not talking about FPS. At all. It doesn’t matter how many FPS there are. I’m talking about the refresh rate, ie, how many times per a second the hardware updates the screen which is in no way related to FPS, which is how many times per second your video card fills the display buffer.
- anotherman554 4y agoI don't follow. All high end OLED TVs these days have a 120 hz refresh rate. This would appear to disprove the idea that TVs have too low a refresh rate for cats.
- LunarAurora 4y agoIMO It is not only the possible form of intelligence at the personal level that counts, but also the aggregate "intelligence" of all humans. This is more easily imagined. To put this crudely, have you ever thought (maybe after an encounter with some person), how better our society would be without all the "backward" (no offences) elements? An ET civilization will certainly judge us at that "aggregate level" (However that comes about)