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Building something that isn't Turing-complete is surprisingly-hard once it's complex enough. If basal intelligence is present in diverse computational structur

• fnord77 2y ago
  Where is it written that intelligent beings must create the means for interstellar communication, or any technology at all? Imagine a planet with highly intelligent whales who have no way to manipulate their environment (hands) and no need to.
  • Teever 2y ago
    Every organism manipulates their environment in some way. The ones that can manipulate it in a way that allows them access to more resources than the others will out compete the ones who don't.
    • abrookewood 2y ago
      Still hard to smelt metal if you live in the ocean.
      • bboygravity 2y ago
        That's why genetic mutations happened and they grew hands and started smelting on land. This happened.
    • gf000 2y ago
      Evolution doesn't really work like that. It's just a low bar that everything has to cross from time to time. Being a specialist, very advanced hunter is in no ways better than a dumb jellyfish that spawns billions of offsprings.
  • dboreham 2y ago
    Experience on earth that they eventually evolve hands.
    • cutemonster 2y ago
      That's because there's land here, but what about a planet with only water, or just not enough land. But maybe water-surface-only (no land surface) is unlikely
      • manmal 2y ago
        There would still be enough earth like planets with land.
      • oersted 2y ago
        Why would water prevent the evolution of hands? Lots of sea creatures have claws. The sea is also not all that different from an atmosphere with a higher density in principle, we live "under-air".
        • cutemonster 2y ago
          Looking at this planet, it's less likely to happen. Maybe high density (water) makes tools less useful, and thus hands less useful, since you cannot move a tool particularly fast under water, compared to on land. I suppose you've tried throwing a stone underwater -- compare with throwing on land. From this seems to follow, that creatures with human like intelligence, are less likely to appear, if the density of the liquid or gas surrounding them, is too high. (Dolphins are bright but not that bright.)
    • RedNifre 2y ago
      That is incorrect, dolphins are unlikely to evolve hands and humanoids evolved hands before they became intelligent (probably to grab branches). It was very lucky that a good brain evolved in a body that already had hands.
      • 2y ago
• dullcrisp 2y ago
  Are you wondering why Conway’s Game of Life or the C++ type system isn’t trying to communicate with us from beyond the stars?
  • mithametacs 2y ago
    Beyond the stars, a static void. Ions, but no aliens. Till one day SETI finds a 5k line template compilation error! Rejoice! We are not alone! Aliens have to deal with C++ too!
• swayvil 2y ago
  >where are the aliens? It's probably a Plato's Cave situation. You're chained there, staring at flickering shadows on the wall asking, "Where are the aliens?". Which is to say, the dimension that must be traversed in order to meet the aliens is an invisible one.
• ChainOfFools 2y ago
  > If weak intelligence is everywhere, Earth-like planets are everywhere, ... where are the aliens? Someone has to be first (in our speed-of-causality bubble), maybe it's us?
  • 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
    Doesn't that seem even less likely? Not only do we exist but we're the first?
    • thrw42A8N 2y ago
      No, it actually seems to be the most likely explanation. The universe is so young yet. It's just a cosmic blip of time since the current generation of stars has began forming.
    • ben_w 2y ago
      Not without more information. We don't know how long it takes to evolve our level and kind of intelligence, nor if intelligence like ours implies successful expansion such that it could eventually be noticed from the kinds of distances we can sense with our tech, nor how fast it would actually expand. If the first in any light cone dominates that light cone, expanding at a high fraction of c, then almost everyone starts off thinking they're the first. We may be the first in our own light cone, and that light cone may be just about to start intersecting with that of a galaxy where every star has been completely Dyson'd by a Kardeshev 3 civilisation. If the civilisation is two million years older than us, that galaxy could even be the Andromeda galaxy.
• FloorEgg 2y ago
  The Fermi paradox can be answered in so many ways, and is tied to questions like what is the purpose of life and the universe. Beyond the existence of a single person (such as myself, or you) what do we exist to do? Is it to learn the universe? (Curiosity) Is it to decrease entropy locally in order to increase it globally? (Spend energy) Is it to increase complexity? (Do interesting things, foster maximum diversity?) For example, if the purpose is indeed curiosity, maybe all we will need is one Dyson sphere in order to understand the universe. We could have a dozen super intelligent life forms in our galaxy alone and probably wouldn't notice them. Basically would just look like a quiet black hole the size of a star.
  • yesco 2y ago
    In my opinion, life is just self-replicating tumbleweeds of matter that drift towards local spaces with high energy. The ideal "shape" of these tumbleweeds is gradually approximated via the algorithm of evolution, filtering out the tumbleweeds that fly too close to the sun and so on. Intelligence becomes an emergent property of these optimal shapes, but intelligence doesn't change the outcome, broadly speaking, they still drift towards local spaces with high energy. Individual organisms will live their life perusing energy, with every breath, with every meal. Even super organisms, such as a nation, will (attempt to) peruse energy in the form of a thriving economy, which influences the energy allocation of the organisms that make it up. Even absent these tumbleweeds, high density matter (high energy) will literally bend space, and attract other matter to itself through gravitational force. It's entirely different than what I've already discussed, yet intuitively similar? How does this apply to the fermi paradox? Maybe the idea that the algorithm of evolution will eventually lead to life self-propagating across the universe is flawed. Maybe the spirit of exploration is not universal. Maybe the the simple fact that interstellar travel and communication is energy inefficient is enough to explain the aggregate effect we are seeing?
    • FloorEgg 2y ago
      it sounds like your take is the entropy one, but with a caveat that dark energy prevents Indefinite growth.
    • 2y ago
• exe34 2y ago
  emotions are just a form of intelligence that's calcified over evolutionary time. each one of our emotions can be linked with survival and/or reproduction.
• woolion 2y ago
  >Building something that isn't Turing-complete is surprisingly-hard once it's complex enough The most basic computational device that is studied is the (deterministic) finite automaton, which corresponds to regular languages (regex, although actual implementations are usually way more powerful). If you add a stack (to count parenthesis basically) you have context-free (CF) languages, which correspond to the syntax of most programming languages. Add a second stack and you're already Turing-complete (TC). If you know that, you can add any extra-power to your machine that is strictly less than a second unbounded stack, and you get a new language class! For a example, a second n-bounded stack. If you do so you will easily get an infinity of language classes. The point is, are they interesting? In particular, the language classes we focus on have some good properties that most arbitrary classes tend to lack. The Chomsky hierarchy has context-sensitive languages in between CF and TC, but it is already not a very natural class so I've never seen it discussed anywhere, even in complexity theory research --which focuses a lot more in getting links to computability theory or subtle distinctions between deterministic and non-deterministic classes (most famously P vs NP). For the latter, studying analogs of the complexity classes on restricted models of computations is an interesting approach since Turing machines are difficult to work with.
  • Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
    In natural language processing, mildly context-sensitive languages (which sit between context-free and context-sensitive) have seen some study and use, because context-free languages fall short to model certain phenomena but context-sensitive are overkill (and not even polynomial to process).
• kstenerud 2y ago
  > If weak intelligence is everywhere, Earth-like planets are everywhere, ... where are the aliens? Most certainly outside of our light cone. It took 4 billion years for this planet to produce intelligent life that can send out radio signals. If we were to wipe ourselves out, it would be another half a billion years for another intelligent species to appear on this planet (probably? - using Cambrian explosion as a benchmark FWIW). We've been emitting radio signals for a century so far, and mayyyyybe we'll last another 1000 years before we blow ourselves up? This is something we can only conjecture about at this point. But just for the sake of argument, let's say that a post-radio-emissions intelligent species lasts 10,000 years. This means that our light cone must match up to a 10,000 year period in a planet's 4b year history (or 500m year repeat) TODAY, in order for us to detect anything at all. The chances of that are vanishingly small. And they're certainly not going to visit us a mere 100 years after we began emitting detectable signals. It's not just a problem of space; it's a problem of time (and timing).
  • worldsayshi 2y ago
    Why isn't at least one species expanding across the cosmos though? The light speed limit isn't really much of a hurdle for cosmic timescales. The guy on cool worlds YouTube channel (Department of Astronomy, Colombia) has argued that we're still in the early days. The conditions for intelligent life in the galaxy hasn't been around for that long.
    • kstenerud 2y ago
      Perhaps there is, but once again it would have to be visible from our light cone in order for us to even be capable of detecting it. Even with a civilization of 100,000 or even a million years that's still tiny and highly unlikely to happen within a timeframe that intersects with our small window of awareness. And even if these aliens have cracked FTL travel, who's ever going to find our little planet on the ass end of some mediocre galaxy, with an EM emissions bubble that has only covered 100 light years so far? Needle in a haystack.
      • Gravityloss 2y ago
• _yb2s 2y ago
  > Or do you need emotions to have conflict? Microbes and insects have massive conflicts.
• naasking 2y ago
  > If weak intelligence is everywhere, Earth-like planets are everywhere, ... where are the aliens? A species needs more than raw intelligence to create technology. They also need: 1. Dexterity: dolphins and ravens are intelligent, but they have no fine motor manipulators, so there is no way to build technology. 2. Reasonably high bandwidth communication: other primates are intelligent, social and dextrous, but don't have sophisticated language for precise and expansive communication. 3. Social inclinations leading to building cultural knowledge across generations: octopuses are intelligent, are reasonably dextrous, and their colour changing ability could possibly be used for reasonably moderate bandwidth communication, but they are largely solitary creatures. There are probably even a couple more. Edit: come to think of it, I think a species that builds technology would need to have all of the above features and feature some distinct physical disadvantages in order to drive them towards compensating by developing tools and knowledge to survive. For instance, humans are physically quite weak compared to other primates.
  • oefnak 2y ago
    Can't make fire under water either.
    • entropicdrifter 2y ago
      Sure you can, it's just harder.
    • naasking 2y ago
      They potentially have access to hydrothermal vents for energy though.
    • HappMacDonald 2y ago
      Sodium metal has entered the chat (Potassium and loads of other materials were too busy playing call of duty to be bothered)
  • 6510 2y ago
    ???? All species are full of technologies, one more exotic than the next. We have a hard time replicating it and we don't understand how it all works. What we have is an insanely fast research, design and construction process. But nothing as simple as a competitive pump on the horizon. Trees be laughing at us.