The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale

Actually, I'm not a layman, and I have some ideas.

The Proterozoic (2 billion years ago) is a time period that geologists affectionately call the 'boring billion'. In those rock strata, we very often find biogenic stromatolites, crumpled accretionary structures produced by the accumulation of mineral waste products in microbial metabolism. In the wild, they look like lumpy rocks on coastlines and in lakes, with a thin biofilm on top. Think of them as the microbial forests through which the early eukaryotes would have foraged and hunted. These ecosystems are also exclusively shallow-water, since they require sunlight and water in copious supply.

As such, they would be wiped out by a 'moderate' gamma ray burst, since they don't have the protection of deep oceans. In other words, there would be a specific moment at which accretion halted for every biogenic stromatolite at the same time. This would be followed, in geologic history, by a shortish period in which newly lithified sediments lacked a biological influence, as life clawed its way back from the deep oceans. Even if the biosphere that followed was indistinguishable from the previous incarnation (which itself seems unlikely), we'd be able to see an interruption.

We haven't yet found evidence of such a hiatus in the Precambrian. It's a big history, so it's always possible that the evidence will come in later- but it's worth pointing out that we have found interruptions of comparable magnitude, from different sources.

Meaning that as a layman, I don't see how we'd distinguish between a past where Earth was hit by a "lethal" GRB 2 billion years ago (when there were just eukaryotes, procaryotes and cyanobacteria), and one were it wasn't.

Indeed, according to Wikipedia at least, we don't know whether the Ordovician–Silurian extinction event was caused by a GRB or not.

Fair enough. I was reaching too far in assuming endosymbiotic events were the limiting factor in that transition.

That's a version of the "chimeric theory", one of a few for the origin of eukaryotic organization: see Wikipedia's article. The DNA of the host cell would have migrated into the encapsulated bacterium or archaeon, through processes that I'll admit I'm a bit fuzzy on.

(Wikipedia links several papers in support of this theory; the only un-paywalled one I could find, however, is Margulis et al. 2000.)

Link to a review article

I don't know the answer to your question other than "they merged more fully than the genomes of other endosymbionts," and in any case endosymbiosis is only one proposed explanation for the origin of the nucleus.

A culture that include the concept of a "raiser" - an octopus with the job of raising the babies, and passing the culture on to them, without mating at all - can avoid that issue. The "raiser" would also improve his average genetic fitness if he is a sibling of one of the parents, since the children would then all have approximately one-quarter of his genes.

This is a lot less motivation than for parents.

If it's not enough to kill off the species, evolution generally won't drop the feature.

Well, for starter if you don't die after mating you might be able to mate again.

According to my source, which is a blog comment that doesn't site its sources, the death is a form of controlled cell-death and scientists have been able to remove the gene responsible and the resulting octopuses (or squid) can mate again later.

In addition, cultural memes can evolve and be passed down completely independently of genes.

It doesn't matter to the cultural memes if they propagate using genetically unfit people; celibate monks were a culture where celibate monkhood was a real thing.

From the genes' point of view, the soma is just a vehicle for transporting the genes through time. With each generation, the genes shed the soma like people change their car. If the parent is unnecessary for the survival of the children, the genes in the children may be better off for not having the parent around to compete for food.

Orson Scott Card uses this dynamic in the later Ender's Game books.

I wonder - if an underwater civilisation were to arise, would they consider an open-air civilisation impossible?

"You're stuck crawling around in a mere two dimensions, unless you put a lot of evolutionary effort into wings, but then you have terrible weight limits on the size of the brain; you can't assign land to kelp farms and then live in the area above it, so total population is severely limited; and every couple of centuries or so a tsunami will come and wipe out anything built along the coast..."

Kelp and fish can be farmed.

Mostly I expect creative surprises based on overall impression about the power of engineering. Let's try to do a bit of exploratory engineering, consider projects that include steps that are clearly suboptimal, but seem like they could do the trick. (A practicing engineer or ten years of planning would improve this dramatically, removing stupid assumptions and finding better alternatives; a hundred thousand years of actually working on the subprojects will do even better.)

Initially, power can be provided by pulling strong vines (some kind of seaweed will probably work) attached together. It should be possible to farm trees somewhere on the shoreline, if you don't mind waiting a few decades (not sure if there are any useful underwater plants, but there could be). A saw could be made of something like a shark jaw with vines attached to the sides, so that it can be dragged back and forth. This could be used to make wooden supporting structures that help with improving control of what kind of change is inflicted on the material by a saw. Eventually, incremental improvements in control and precision of saws would allow getting to something functionally similar to sawmills, bonecraft and woodcraft tools.

These enable screws, joints, jars and all kinds of basic mechanical components, which can be used in the construction of tools for controlling things on surfaces of rafts, so that in principle it becomes possible to do anything there given enough woodcrafting and bonecrafting work. At this point we also probably have fire and can use tides to power simple machinery, so that it's practical to create bigger controlled environments and study chemistry and materials. And we get concrete/cement to create watertight buildings and possibly canals with locks for land access. Something like ironsand or ores from surface exploration can be used to initially get metal and develop precision tools, at which point we get electricity and more powerful chemistry capable of extracting all kinds of things from available materials, however inefficiently. After that, there doesn't appear to be much difference from what's available to humans.

The dolphins could practice eugenics and evolve hands or lungs. If they find that unethical, they could selectively breed other organisms for various tasks. The same way us humans bootstrapped our civilization. We didn't start farming and building cities overnight, we had to selectively breed productive crops first. Then useful work animals like horses.

A modern dolphin can get basically all the food its needs with minimal effort

They don't. They either starve, be killed by predators, humans or by something.

They haven't escape this bloody cycle of exponential population grow on one, and mass death on other hand.

There is nothing like a "stable population" among dolphins.

if they form a society conductive to long-term pursuit of the project

Why would they want to?

This is part of a hypothetical intended to explore the issue of technical feasibility of developing technology using only dolphin bodies (underwater, etc.). This hypothetical removes two other most obvious issues in order to focus attention on this one. It removes the issue of developing useful-in-practice understanding of science by assuming that we have modern engineers. It removes the issue of unfavorable incentives by assuming that the incentives are directed towards the project.

You can explore other issues in other hypotheticals.

Why would they want to? A modern dolphin can get basically all the food its needs with minimal effort,so the main competition is intra-species.

This group of dolphins might do it as a (long-term) way to better compete with that group of dolphins over there.

Let's picture that we literally took 10 000 top human engineers and scientists, with all our human knowledge, into dolphin bodies, on another planet with no human artefacts.

That's a bad start. The issue is not whether intelligent dolphins will be able to replicate human civilization, the issue is whether they might be able to develop their own -- one which will look very different from human and which, I suspect, would be largely beyond our imagination at the moment.

Meanwhile, a planet populated with those same scientists and engineers in human bodies - hell, dog bodies, cat >bodies, elephant bodies - would've had it all sorted out in no time.

Taken literally, no. There will not be any civilization above hunter-gatherers without domesticated plants and animals, and that cannot be done in one generation. Remember that ox and wheat also are human artefacts. Well, realistically (in human variant) most of them will be dead very soon, survivors become nomadic hunters.

This strikes me as very human centric. Why should another species' hypothetical ascension look so much like the one we happened to observe in humans?

Meanwhile, a planet populated with those same scientists and engineers in human bodies - hell, dog bodies, cat >bodies, elephant bodies - would've had it all sorted out in no time. They'd have steel, electricity, running water, >radio, and so on, in less than a generation - hell even 10 people can do that.

You greatly underestimate population size nesessary for civilization.

So, our dolphin people now need to somehow develop a way of writing down their knowledge underwater, which they can only do very laboriously because they haven't got hands.

They don't need to write it down, they just need to store it. A certain amount of knowledge can be "stored" as oral tradition; alternatively, a lot more knowledge can be stored as (say) a pattern of rocks, carefully gathered and moved into position, in an area that can be easily visited.

Some knowledge will almost certainly be lost in the first few generations, despite that.

Not necessarily. For reasons that are completely intuitive, I imagine our top 10 000 scientist et al. would be able to fashion tools, that could be used very effectively.

You make the assumption (albeit loosely) that progress happens along a straight pre-determined path, where things happen in a specific sequence, much like they did in human history. This is far from so. We are talking about a different planet out here. I'm not suggesting that different laws of physics will be applicable.

But the odds are that the oceanography, will be vastly different, with all sorts of different materials that would be available. There's no guarantee that this planet (from here on called "Dolphin Alpha") that steel would even exist or the necessary elements are present on the planet. On the other hand, you could possibly have all manner of other material. Perhaps, under water civilization would have a very different set of social rules.

HEAVY USE OF HYPERBOLE FOLLOWS

Given that these are the most brilliant 10 000 scientists that are present on the planet, I'd expect a sizeable number of them to know morse code, which can then be replicated in dolphin sounds (am no expert, but you'd need only two distinguishable sounds if I've got the concept correct). A good number more would be experts in Game theory. The homo sapiens dolphinus (again no expert, but this sounds authentic enough to me! How about we call them HSD for short?) that happen to know both morse code and be well versed in the more salient features of Game Theory, would probably rise to political power within the ranks of the HSD, and since these arent politicians who are in it for material gain (that part comes much later in the advent of a civilisation) and are truly interested in the welfare of the civilisation, would probably find ways to domesticate (or if you prefer the harsher equivalent "enslave"), all sorts of smaller creatures that could work for them!!

For the sake of simplicity, if we assume that marine life on Dolhin Alpha evolved roughly in parallel with that of Earth, the Dolphin Alpha Crabs (resembling the ones that live under water not the other type) and Dolphin Alpha Lobsters could work like minions. The HSD could decipher which fish are poisonous and use that knowledge to hunt larger and more meatier underwater species (I was thinking sharks, but that takes experimentation and I somehow see the world's leading scientists thinking long and hard and then deciding that there are safer options at hand, except for the few who were also born adrenaline junkies and are now flapping their fins in excitement)

Before I get further carried away, I would just like to say that the body shape is something that can be easily overcome.

Whether intelligence would arise to a greater degree, really is a matter up for debate, but I would b inclined to think the answer is no, until the HSD discovers the equivalent of computing.

if we make a simple replicator and have it successfully reach another solar system (with possibly habitable planets) then that would seem to demonstrate that the filter is behind us.

Excellent! So, wouldn't that mean that the best way to eliminate x-risk would be to do exactly that?

It is counterintuitive, because "eliminating x-risk" implies some activity, some fixing of something. But we eliminated the risk of devastating asteroid impact not by nuking any dangerous ones, but by mapping all of them and concluding the risk didn't exist. As it happens, that was also much cheaper than any asteroid deflection could have been.

If sending out an interstellar replicator was proof we're further ahead (i.e. less vulnerable) than anything that could have evolved inside this galaxy since the dawn of time, it seems mightily important to become more certain we can do that (without AI). If some variant of our interstellar replicator was capable of enabling intergalactic travel, that'd raise our expectation of comparative invulnerability because we'd know we've gone past obstacles that nothing inside some fraction of our light cone even outside our galaxy has been able to master.

Ideally we'd actually demonstrate that of course, but for the purpose of eliminating (perceived) x-risk, a highly evolved and believable model of how it could be done should go much of the way.

Of course we might find out that self-replicating spacecraft are a lot harder than they look, but that too would be information that is valuable for the long-term survival of our species.

Armstrong and Sandberg claim the feasibility of self-replicating spacecraft has been a settled matter since the Freitag design in 1980. But that paper, while impressively detailed and a great read, glosses over the exact computing abilities such a system would need, does not mention hardening against interstellar radiation, and probably has a bunch of other problems that I'm not qualified to discover. I haven't looked at all the papers that cite it (yet), but the once I've seen seem to agree self-replicating spacecraft are plausible.

I posit that greater certainty on that point would be of outsized value to our species. So why aren't we researching it? Am I overlooking something?

Can you elaborate/point us in their direction?

That said, it seems that several features of modern humans evolved separately in different environments- color vision in the jungles to identify fruits

It's not clear why color vision is necessary for intelligence. In any case most vertebrates have (at least) three color vision. In most mammals this was reduced to two but in primates a mutation increased this to three. So its not like three color vision is hard to evolve.

It's hard to argue that anyone does, I suppose.

The narrow argument would be that, temporally speaking, savannas and colored fruits are rare even on Earth. For any solar-powered primary producer in any theoretical biosphere, there is a basic evolutionary height advantage- you increase the percentage of the time you are in sunlight, spread reproductive tissues over a wider area, and cast shade on nearby competitors. As soon as Earth plants developed vascular systems for vertical nutrient transport (~350 million years ago), forest-morphologies began to dominate the most fertile land areas, so that open areas correlated with geographically distant harsh conditions or a lack of nutrients (deserts, tundra, inland mountains).

The last 60 million years or so have been the exception to this rule, leading to the distinctive savanna ecosystems of the Cenozoic. They really took off after an evolutionary innovation in photosynthesis, C4 carbon fixation, which has its own environmental contingencies. The drought tolerance and efficiency in carbon fixation of these plants are responsible for the existence of 'fertile' areas that also have high visibility- and in particular, the close proximity of dense forests and open plains (and coastlines where there are coastlines). As such, the geographic feature is highly contingent on a specific evolutionary pathway within a particular atmospheric regime- and the window could have been closed after a brief period of time by further developments.

The broader argument would point out that, as the wiki page notes, C4 carbon fixation evolved independently a lot, implying that it is closely adjacent to many plant types. The 'height race' in terrestrial primary producers may even increase the probability of this development, since it exacerbates the problem of evapotranspiration. If our method of chemical photosynthesis is a common first step in the early development of many planetary biospheres, then C4 carbon fixation may be a common development as well. Whenever you set up primary producers with a certain capacity for internal structure, in cool and dry climates, C4 organisms may be an expected result. We might phrase this argument, 'the dominance of forest-like ecologies is not stable in evolutionary timescales'.

The even broader argument is that these geographic requirements are not strictly related to savannas and jungles per se; the relevant contingency is 'environment that selects for erect poses and color vision in a nutrient-rich area'. These factors are not in tension in any obvious way, so we'd need a clever reason to say that this is a great filter.

Also how long do dolphins and octopusses have time to come up with current human level intelligence until considered "filtered out"? I would recorn they would still have atleast a couple ten million years left.

We don't know much about the evolutionary history of octopuses -- they're practically nothing but soft parts and don't fossilize well -- so it's hard to say exactly how long the clade's been around. Our best guess is that they diverged from the vampyromorphs sometime in the Devonian, or ~360 mya (!), though of course octopuses of that era might not have been very smart.

Given the clade's modern diversity, though, octopuses seem likely to have been fairly intelligent as animals go for a very long time. That's suggestive of a soft filter of some sort; two possibilities might be their short lifespans (octopuses rarely make it five years, and die soon after mating) or the fact that they're largely solitary animals. Some squid, however, are more social.

Cetaceans are a much younger clade, having evolved from wolf-like ancestors (albeit more closely related to cows) in the Eocene. And their intelligence is probably younger still; if encephalization quotient is anything to go by, archaeocetes were dumb as rocks. Unfortunately, most cetacean species are poorly researched, cognitively speaking, so we can't nail down the evolutionary timeline with precision.

Also how long do dolphins and octopusses have time to come up with current human level intelligence until considered "filtered out"? I would recorn they would still have atleast a couple ten million years left.

Personally, I would consider them "filtered out" if and when they go extinct. So they may still have quite a bit of time left.

Maybe not explicitly, but I keep seeing people refer to "the great filter" as if it was a single thing. But maybe you're right and I'm reading too much into this.

From the OP:

The real filter could be a combination of an early one and a late one, of course. But, unless the factors are exquisitely well-balanced, its likely that there is one location in civilizational development where most of the filter lies (ie where the probability of getting to the next stage is the lowest).

That's very non-obvious to me; I can't see why there couldn't be (say) a step with probability around 1e-12, one with probability around 1e-7, one with probability around 1e-5, one with probability around 1e-2, and a dozen ones with joint probability around 1e-1, so that no one step comprises the majority (logarithmically) of the filter.

From the article:

The real filter could be a combination of an early one and a late one, of course. But, unless the factors are exquisitely well-balanced, its likely that there is one location in civilizational development where most of the filter lies (ie where the probability of getting to the next stage is the lowest).

That doesn't sound like it admits the possibility of twelve, independent, roughly equally balanced filters.

Interesting. However, I still don't see why the filter would work similarly to a chemical reaction. Unless it's a general law of statistics that any event is always far more likely to have a single primary cause, it seems like a strange assumption since they are such dissimilar things.

I think you need to explain your meaning more

Wait... don't all eukaryotes have mitochondria, including unicellular ones? I think “Complex single cells unlikely” on the poll is a better fit to your position.

I'm wary of calling cyanobacteria with their specialized nitrogen-fixer cells or the various colonial sporangia-forming bacteria 'multicellular'. They do some hellacious cell specializing within colonies, and there are other bacteria that form chains between reducing and oxidizing environments with bacteria in the middle passing electrons back and forth so as to allow the whole colony to metabolize things one bacterium couldn't, but it's arguably a little different than what we think of when we think of a mushroom or an animal.

Eukaryotes have however evolved unambiguous multicellularity on many occasions.

In lineages not directly discended from one another (though they do have a common (unicellular) ancestor). According to the article I linked to it even happened to prokaryotes, though “complex” multicellular organisms (whatever that means -- I guess cells not only bound together but also specialized?) ‘only’ evolved six times among eukaryotes.

It is possible that eukaryotes are particularly propense to becoming multicellular the way the OP claims bilaterians are propense to becoming intelligent, but I'd interpret each item of the poll to be conditional on all of the above, and I'd take “complex single cell life” to mean eukaryotes on Earth or similar.

The logic is actually from Hanson's "The Great Filter" essay.

For example, say you have one hour to pick five locks by trial and error, locks with 1,2,3,4, and 5 dials of ten numbers, so that the expected time to pick each lock is .01,.1, 1, 10, and 100 hours respectively. Then just looking at those rare cases when you do pick all five locks in the hour, the average time to pick the first two locks would be .0096 and .075 hours respectively, close to the usual expected times of .01 and .1 hours. The average time to pick the third lock, however, would be .20 hours, and the average time for the other two locks, and the average time left over at the end, would be .24 hours. That is, conditional on success, all the hard steps, no matter how hard, take about the same time, while easy steps take about their usual time (see Technical Appendix). And all these step durations (and the time left over) are roughly exponentially distributed (with standard deviation at least 76% of the mean). (Models where the window closing is also random give similar results.)

I think calling it a "filter" implicitly primes people for the impression that the options are supergalactic civilization or death, and to exclude possibilities where things keep going but don't become astronomically visible.

Do you have any candidates for these features? Because there are two ways of seeing your argument: a) There are some very rare features (like the moon) that are necessary for life. This makes intelligent life very rare. b) There are some features that Earth has that are necessary for life, and Earth is one of the earliest planets with these features.

a) explains the Fermi paradox by rarity of intelligence, while b) explains it by saying the first intelligence will expand and prevent other from developing independently. But b) requires that we guess what these features could be.

The last common ancestor of humans and octopuses probably didn't have a very complicated nervous system, but it probably did have a nervous system: most likely a simple lateral cord with ganglia, like some modern wormlike animals. That seems to meet the criteria for shminux's "dedicated organism-wide communication subsystem".

And I implicitly did mean "right before", so your reading was correct.

I bet there are people out there who do this for a living.

There's this Ph.D. thesis and video all about multicellular coordination in slime moulds. This is an organism which switches between unicellular and multicellular habits, with cell specialisation, and competition among cells to be among those that make spores and get their genes into the next generation.

A gold-ingot-manufacturing-maximizer can easily manufacture more gold than exists in their star system by using arbitrary amounts of energy to create gold, starting with simple nuclear reactions to transmute bismuth or lead into gold and ending with direct energy to matter to gold ingots process.

Furthermore, if you plan to send copies-of-you to N other systems to manufacture gold ingots there, as long as there is free energy, you can send N+1 copies-of-you. A gold ingot manufacturing rate that grows proportionally to time^(n+1) is much faster than time^n, so sending N copies wouldn't be maximizing.

And a third point is that if it's possible that somewhere in the universe there are some ugly bags of mostly water that prefer to use their atoms and energy for not manufacturing gold ingots but their survival; then it's very important to ensure that they don't grow strong enough to prevent you from maximizing gold ingot manufacturing. Speed is of the essence, you must reach them before it's too late, or gold ingot manufacture won't get maximized.

You are forgetting about quantum uncertainty. There is always a chance that all of the gold on earth will jump to a blackhole. The more free energy you have, the more you can reduce this probability.

I no longer believe that anthropic probabilities make sense (see http://lesswrong.com/lw/891/anthropic_decision_theory_i_sleeping_beauty_and/ and subsequent posts - search "anthropic decision theory" in less wrong), only anthropic decisions do. Applying this to these situations, total utilitarians should (roughly) act as if there was a late filter, while average utilitarians and selfish beings should act as if was an early filter.

How many bonobos are there in captivity? How many non-bonobo chimps have killed other chimps?

A pattern in quasar flashes perhaps?

I'm more thinking of mega engineering projects, the reforming of galaxies to suit the needs of a civilization, rather that the messy randomness and waste of negentropy that we seem to see.

I'm not assuming that advanced technology would want us to observe it - I'm assuming that advanced technology has no reason to stay hidden from us, at tremendous opportunity costs for it.