Natural Intelligence is Overhyped

post by Collisteru · 2025-01-21T18:09:16.167Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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  NOAA DISCOVERS INSCRIBED METEOR ARTIFACT UNDERNEATH ATLANTIC
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Like this piece? It's cross-posted from by blog: https://collisteru.net/writing/

This is a work of fiction and parody. I have done my best to get the scientific details right as far as they are known today, but my real goal is social commentary, not scientific accuracy.

 

NOAA DISCOVERS INSCRIBED METEOR ARTIFACT UNDERNEATH ATLANTIC

Dec 8, 2018

Scientists from NOAA claim to have discovered an ancient text hundreds of kilometers off the coast of Nova Scotia. During a recent months-long exploration of the Sohm Abyssal Plain by the OKEANOS explorer, scientists deployed the new deep-sea probe Thalassa. The vessel comes equipped with an autonomously-driven mode and a human guidance mode, three superbright LED flashlights, and a claw to grip stones and other deep-sea detritus. While the aim of the NOAA team was to learn more about the deep-sea biomes of the North Atlantic, they got much more than they bargained for when a scientist spotted what looked to be a large, flat, dark stone with a totally smooth surface. Jessica Kochav, vice deputy of the expedition, describes what happened next:

"We were expecting a slab of concrete or piece of trash, so a lot of us thought it wasn't worth getting close. But something about it gave me a weird feeling, and I insisted that we investigate. It was a lot shinier than the other rocks and totally black. There was a giant and perfectly flat circular face half-buried in the sand. When we shined the light directly on it, the whole thing gleamed like a giant mirror. At this point we were really freaked out, hahah! The surface looked like it had a ton of little scratches on it. We took pictures, and Mark was able to drill off a little piece to bring up to the surface. I'm a marine geologist, not an archaeologist, so I tried not to draw any conclusions until we got the data in front of experts."

The sample was sent to a geophysics center in Colorado to be analyzed. Within a day scientists determined that the rock was composed uniformly of 6% nickel and 94% carbon-poor iron. This starkly differs from the composition of the underlying oceanic crust. It could only be ferrous meteorite.

The photos proved to take longer to analyze. One mysterious description released by an archaeologist brought publicity to the case: "The surface of the meteorite is remarkably polished and well-preserved. Tiny letters are clearly visible when zoomed-in. We don't know which alphabet they belong to." And this stayed unknown for about a month. Archaeologists passed the digital photos among themselves, looking for someone familiar with this alphabet. Many thought it was a variant of Mi'kmaw hieroglyphs. A few others guessed that it was an inscription from Norse settlement of the region. The Institute was ready to move on when the photo was leaked to the internet by an anonymous intern. Within three hours, a Redditor identified the script as Enochian, a “Celestial Language” constructed by the English occultist John Dee in the 16th century.

The photos were immediately brought to the attention of Rudolf Witte, the foremost (frankly, only) living expert on Enochian. Witte said that the text was unlike any he had seen before, and contained many inventions in grammar and vocabulary that were seen in none of the texts published by Dee. This made translation a challenge, but after about a month of constant work, Witte released to a few private acquaintances his translation. This translation can now be released publicly, and is displayed below.

 

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE:

This is a sense-by-sense, not a word-for-word, translation. As such, it has been optimized for readability rather than strict accuracy. Please find attached an interlinear gloss for those who are technically interested in the original text. I have done this because so much is lost in the translation to English, that I want to at least retain readability. I believe that this text references multiple historical events in the distant past. I have no comments on the validity of the text itself, other than to say that the diction and weave of the words is by far the most finely-crafted of any text I have read in any language.

— Rudolf Witte

 

My dear friends,

It’s hard to believe that, even before we began our great project, there were already calls to pause or limit the development of Natural Intelligence (NI). Even my smarter colleagues babbled about how the rapacious monkeys will “spread and mow down our prior works both vegetable and animal.” Nowadays, the question is more whether they will even avoid freezing to death. It’s just another sign that NI is nowhere close to living up to the hype.

Before I go further, let's clarify what exactly the fuss is about. Here we have the weakest type of ape ever developed. They are not only more feeble than their ancestors, but also have weaker stomachs, stunted claws, and less individual hardiness. People usually acknowledge this but insist that "you have to see them together!," as if the apes formed a hive mind better than insects.

In reality, the apes' social capabilities have been greatly exaggerated. Their behavior hardly differs from that of the other ape species. They travel in packs where they are hunted more often than they hunt. They fight other packs and each other for dominance. They are competitive by nature and cooperative only in certain circumstances. Calling this behavior 'intelligent' is nothing but marketing.

We've seen this show before. Consider the octopus, who a few millions of years ago was hailed as a new frontier. Many said that octopi would find a way to spread into the open oceans and even dry land. Neither happened and neither will. Octopi are relatively clever, and of course they are well-adapted to their environment, but hardly “self-adapting” as some claimed at the time. Everyone who thought the octopus would take over the world has now conveniently forgotten their prediction.

The examples don't end there. Remember the first Austropolithecines? They dispersed far from their homes, too, and could eat almost everything. Yet one became of all their promise? They were wiped out by the same climatic changes that are likely to wipe out this new breed of hominin. The weird vicarious ambition now latches onto a type of bipedal ape.

It's even more laughable when the promoters say their ability to run will let them take over the world. It took them hundreds of thousands of years to spread from East to South Africa, and now progress seems to be slowing. Plenty of birds have a larger range than that! Even on a theoretical level, it seems far-fetched that any animal could dominate all of Earth's surface or even a large fraction of it. There are too many climates to adapt to all at once. Mark my words: the bipeds will never leave their home continent.

That being said, there's a bit of truth in every crazy theory. People who say that the hominins will bring destruction have a point. Anyone who has seen their bloody hunts, or how they strip wood away from trees with their sharpened rocks, will admit this. While they aren't smart or numerous enough to threaten the Earth, they could hurt a few species. Just yesterday a friend of mine observed one who skewered a shrew alive with a stone knife, and then bit its head off. You won't see a hyena doing that. Perhaps overgrown brains lead to overgrown cruelty.

That brings us to talk about their tools, something that promoters have made a big fuss over. The big news: they have them. So what? There is no fundamental difference between that and animal intelligence, and certainly nothing that suggests creativity or reason. Ravens, crows, dolphins, sea otters, and countless other animals have been using tools for years. The use of stones to break things is common among the ottters, and the manufactures of such rudimentary implements is well-known among corvids. Don’t get taken in by the hype about this new “skilled” hominin. Whatever “skills” it may have are just more complicated versions of age-old instincts, powered by an oversized central nervous system.

Another typical argument that it's different this time is ape "communication." That refers to the way they mix and match their utterances to lead to the delivery of more complicated messages than previous apes. However, the apes can only imitate the grunts of other apes and the sounds of nature. Everything they say is generated by neurons and therefore has no meaning. There's no causality or inductive reasoning. While it is progress, it still isn't communication — apes cannot communicated directly mind-to-mind, so they never will be able to communicate like angels do. Mixing and matching grunts isn't communication.

Nor can the apes "reason" as some people have claimed. Tests have shown that they learn and understand remarkably little about the world by themselves. The only way they learn about cause and effect is by stealing that information from each other and from other animals. Because they can't access the world of platonic forms, they can't form ideas. Hominins have never made anything original: they just copy what they see from nature and from each other. They're copycats, fundamentally dependent on mimicking nature and each other and not building on it. They're really just pattern matchers, in fact, if we renamed "natural intelligence" to "natural pattern-matching," it would describe much better what they actually do.

Hallucination is just more proof of this. When hominins say things about the world, they're usually wrong. They hallucinate all kinds of gods and tricksters. They make up spells and rituals that don't work. They claim to see things that aren't there. They do this because their brains were formed to survive and anticipate the social and physical dynamics of their environment. The brain was made to keep the animal alive, not to discern the world as it truly is. No bundle of pattern-matching neurons, however big, will be able to reason. To say otherwise is nothing more than smoke.

A few of those willing to admit this much still think that apes will improve. One day (apparently), they'll somehow become intelligent and gain a soul. Of course, everyone who's developed any creature wants to say that an actually impressive version is just around the corner. But can we consider the idea that hominins might not get better? The evidence for a plateau in hominin development is strong. They already spend over a sixth of their energy on their brains. Most of them can't keep up this level of consumption and die, so it's unlikely that their brains will get any better. And this is in fact exactly what we see: for the past tens of thousands of years, their average brain size has remained the same. Even if, despite all this, the size of their brains did continue to grow, that is no guarantee of scaling capabilities. The whale brain is ten times more heavy than the hominin brain, but whales aren't ten times smarter.

All this still leaves the fundamental problem unaddressed: there is a fundamental difference in kind between animal cognition and true reason, which is unique to divine beings. Proponents of hominid development have failed to show that one will lead to the other, because it won't. They are different in kind, not just scale, and this this lends serious doubt to Agiel's claim that hominins will become "the most powerful creature ever developed."

Amid all this debate we've given huge spans of attention and resources to hominin development. We've made strenuous efforts to guide the evolutionary history of mammals up to this point, a fantastic habitat being only the most costly among them. We've kept them from being wiped out in the last few thousand years by predation or climate changes. How have they thanked us? By consuming resources hugely disproportionate to the amount of beauty and majesty they add to the Created World, all while slowly destroying it.

Have we considered that it might be time to halt hominin development, or even get rid of them? We scrapped the dinosaurs, and they were frankly way more impressive. Even if the apes somehow do take over the world, the environmental impacts will be devastating. Generally, I just don't think evolving fleshy things is a good way to govern the Earth. We should continue governing the Earth ourselves - at most, in tandem with some form of creature that is at least half angelic. Then, we'll stop underestimating ourselves. Angels need to remember that we are unique in the universe. We cannot create beings strong enough to replace us.

Warmly,

— Lucifer

June 10th, 1,700,000 BC"

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