I wonder if there’s a higher level of intelligence that is physically possible, but just wasn’t favored by natural selection. The brain is such a masterpiece as is, it’s hard to imagine improving it.
I don’t think there’s any reason why higher intelligence wouldn’t be possible, we just got to the bare minimum needed to create a technological civilization at which point there hasn’t been much selection happening for further our intelligence. One of the core features of intelligence is the ability to extrapolate future states based on the present state of things and act on that in a way that benefits you and your species. We’re currently failing at this task collectively.
Our knowledge allows us to operate on a scale that’s affecting the entire planet. Yet, our understanding is still limited to that of animals that used to live in small tribes in a largely static environment. When we lived in the wild, our primary concerns were to make sure we had enough food to eat for the day and that we didn’t get eaten ourselves. Nowadays, we need to have a much longer term perspective because our actions have huge global impact.
Unfortunately, humans primarily act based on emotion as opposed to reason. Anything we do is ultimately driven by the urges we feel. We eat when we’re hungry, we sleep when we’re tired, and so on. These are basic regulatory instincts that evolved over billions of years and predate things like language and rational thought. We are animals first and foremost no matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise.
This aspect of human psyche makes it very difficult to prioritize long term problems over short term ones. People can understand that horrible things will happen ten to twenty years down the road if we don’t act on climate change, but they don’t want to make sacrifices that will make them uncomfortable today in order to avert that. Reducing your current level of comfort goes directly against all the instincts while future you that will suffer feels like an abstract problem. We have far more emotional attachment to the present than we do to the future. So instead of dealing with large scale problems we rely on our eternal optimism to convince ourselves that things will magically work out in the future.
Improving our brains to be able to favor longer term perspective over the short term one would be one obvious upgrade in human intelligence.
I wonder if there’s a higher level of intelligence that is physically possible, but just wasn’t favored by natural selection. The brain is such a masterpiece as is, it’s hard to imagine improving it.
I don’t think there’s any reason why higher intelligence wouldn’t be possible, we just got to the bare minimum needed to create a technological civilization at which point there hasn’t been much selection happening for further our intelligence. One of the core features of intelligence is the ability to extrapolate future states based on the present state of things and act on that in a way that benefits you and your species. We’re currently failing at this task collectively.
Our knowledge allows us to operate on a scale that’s affecting the entire planet. Yet, our understanding is still limited to that of animals that used to live in small tribes in a largely static environment. When we lived in the wild, our primary concerns were to make sure we had enough food to eat for the day and that we didn’t get eaten ourselves. Nowadays, we need to have a much longer term perspective because our actions have huge global impact.
Unfortunately, humans primarily act based on emotion as opposed to reason. Anything we do is ultimately driven by the urges we feel. We eat when we’re hungry, we sleep when we’re tired, and so on. These are basic regulatory instincts that evolved over billions of years and predate things like language and rational thought. We are animals first and foremost no matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise.
This aspect of human psyche makes it very difficult to prioritize long term problems over short term ones. People can understand that horrible things will happen ten to twenty years down the road if we don’t act on climate change, but they don’t want to make sacrifices that will make them uncomfortable today in order to avert that. Reducing your current level of comfort goes directly against all the instincts while future you that will suffer feels like an abstract problem. We have far more emotional attachment to the present than we do to the future. So instead of dealing with large scale problems we rely on our eternal optimism to convince ourselves that things will magically work out in the future.
Improving our brains to be able to favor longer term perspective over the short term one would be one obvious upgrade in human intelligence.
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