Rupert Sheldrake suggests that consciousness is partly about seeing possibilities for our future, evaluating them, and choosing between them. If we make decisio

Rupert Sheldrake suggests that consciousness is partly about seeing possibilities for our future, evaluating them, and choosing between them. If we make decisions the same way, they change to unconscious habits. A hungry creature can eat what it sees or stay hungry. Another has more memory and more awareness of different bark and leaves and dead animals to choose from. Another has a better memory of places with safe food in the past and how to get to them. A tool using human can reason down longer chains like 'threaten an enemy and take their food' or 'setup a trap to kill an animal' or 'dig up root, grind root into mash, boil it, eat the gruel'. In that model, a super intelligence might be able to: - Extract larger patterns from less information. (Con: more risk of a mistake). - Connect more patterns or more distant patterns together with less obvious connections. (Con: risk of self-delusion). - Evaluate longer chains of events more accurately with a larger working memory, more accurate mental models. (Con: needs more brain power, more energy, maybe longer time spent in imagination instead of defending self). - Recall more precise memories more easily. (Con: cost of extra brain to store informaiton and validate memories). This would be a good model for [fictional] Dr House, he's memorised more illnesses, he's more attentive to observing small details on patients, and more able to use those to connect to existing patterns, and cut through the search space of 'all possible illnesses' to a probable diagnosis based on less information than the other doctors. They run out of ideas quicker, they know fewer diseases, and they can't evaluate as long chains of reasoning from start to conclusion, or make less accurate conclusions. In one episode, House meets a genius physicist/engineer and wants to get his opinion on medical cases, but the physicist declines because he doesn't have the medical training to make any sense of the cases. It also suggests that extra intelligence might get eaten up by other people - predicting what they will do, while they use their extra intelligence to try to be unpredictable. And it would end up as exciting as a chess final, where both grandmasters sit in silence trying to out-reason their opponent through deeper chains in a larger subset of all possible moves until eventually making a very small move. And from the outside players all seem the same but they can reliably beat me and they cannot reliably beat each other.