Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: How special are human brains among animal brains?, published by Alex Zhu on the AI Alignment Forum.
Humans are capable of feats of cognition that appear qualitatively more sophisticated than those of any other animals. Is this appearance of a qualitative difference indicative of human brains being essentially more complex than the brains of any other animal? Or is this “qualitative difference” illusory, with the vast majority of human cognitive feats explainable as nothing more than a scaled-up version of the cognitive feats of lower animals?
“How special are human brains among animal brains?” is one of the background variables in my framework for AGI timelines. My aim for this post is not to present a complete argument for some view on this variable, so much as it is to:
present some considerations I’ve encountered that shed light on this variable
invite a collaborative effort among readers to shed further light on this variable (e.g. by leaving comments about considerations I haven’t included, or pointing out mistakes in my analyses)
Does mastery of language make humans unique?
Human conscious experience may have emerged from language
Humans seem to have much higher degrees of consciousness and agency than other animals, and this may have emerged from our capacities for language. Helen Keller (who was deaf and blind since infancy, and only started learning language when she was 6) gave an autobiographical account of how she was driven by blind impetuses until she learned the meanings of the words “I” and “me”:
Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.
. When I learned the meaning of "I" and "me" and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me. Thus it was not the sense of touch that brought me knowledge. It was the awakening of my soul that first rendered my senses their value, their cognizance of objects, names, qualities, and properties. Thought made me conscious of love, joy, and all the emotions. I was eager to know, then to understand, afterward to reflect on what I knew and understood, and the blind impetus, which had before driven me hither and thither at the dictates of my sensations, vanished forever.
Mastery of language may have conferred unique intellectual superpowers
I think humans underwent a phase transition in their intellectual abilities when they came to master language, at which point their intellectual abilities jumped far beyond those of other animals on both an individual level and a species level.
On an individual level, our capacity for language enables us to entertain and express arbitrarily complex thoughts, which appears to be an ability unique to humans. In theoretical linguistics, this is referred to as “digital infinity”, or “the infinite use of finite means”.
On a species level, our mastery of language enables intricate insights to accumulate over generations ...
view more