undefined | Better HN

0 pointssoerxpso1y ago0 comments

There was necessarily a "first reasoning being" who learned reasoning from scratch, and then it's improved from there. Humans needed tens of thousands of years because:

- humans experience reality at a slower pace than AI could theoretically experience a simulated reality

- humans have to transfer knowledge to the next generation every 80 years (in a manner that's very lossy), and around half of each human lifespan is spent learning things that the previous generation already knew

0 comments

addicted1y ago

The idea that there was “necessarily a first reasoning being” is neither obvious nor likely.

Reasoning could very well have originally been an emergent property of a group of beings.

The animal kingdom is full of examples of groups being more intelligent than individuals, including in human animals as of today.

It’s entirely possible that reasoning emerged as a property of a group before it emerged in any individual first.

carlob1y ago

I think you are focusing too much on the fact that a being needs to be an individual organism, which is kind of an implementation detail.

What I wonder instead is whether reasoning is a property that is either there or not there, with a sharp boundary of existence.

butlike1y ago

The dead organism cannot reason. It's simply a survivorship-bias. Reasoning evolved like any other survival mechanism.

soerxpsoOP1y ago

Whether the first reasoning entity is an individual organism or a group of organisms is completely irrelevant to the original point. If one were to grant that there was in fact a "first reasoning group" rather than a "first reasoning being" the original argument would remain intact.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse