dynomight internet forum

Human intelligence is not capable of understanding the universe in a complete way.

We lack the hardware: we have the sense of touch, smell, taste, sight, and hearing, all are rather specifically tuned to our most proximate use cases, maybe we have a few more senses that we haven't articulated well yet, but probably not very useful (in a grand sense).

We lack the software: While we are intelligent relative to every other form of life on Earth (that we know about), it seems highly unlikely that we are just now in the place and time in the existence of our species that we have developed the level of consciousness and insight and (contemporaneously) the scientific understanding and material knowledge and capabilities required to characterize the reality we live in.

An amoeba cannot imagine the intellect of a frog, and the frog cannot imagine the intellect of a human being, and so-on. There is no reason to think we are not rather low on the chain of possible animal intelligence. There may be hard limits on the level of intelligence that can be obtained via natural selection of carbon based life-forms on our planet, and even if we could become dramatically more intelligent (IQ 300, 3000, 30000, etc.) it is unclear (and improbable) that the combination of our evolved sensory mechanisms (hardware for obtaining information) and intelligence (software) would be "the right stuff" to discover the essence of existence...because evolution is more about keeping score of who gets laid, and there is no reason to think that the "understand the universe and all of material reality" sidequest has any correlation with getting laid. You could reasonably say that, for example, biomass is a form of embodied wisdom - "There is a lot of us and we aren't going anywhere," then plants, protists, fungi, bacteria, etc. all seem to have us beat. While it seems highly likely that 1 million years from now there will be trees that strongly resemble those that exist now, it is highly unlikely that humans in our ultra complicated ultra niche fragile life cycle will exist in our current form. Hard to say probability-wise if we will continue to increase in our complexity (sensory abilities, consciousness, intellect), because there is an intuitive sense that simplicity a la ants is a better strategy, yet we do exist...

I have never once created an account on a website in order to leave a comment on a blog post. But, holy smokes.

Thanks for this—very much informing my thinking.

What is the motivation for humans to "move molecules" for the Being, specifically in the question of curing cancer?

I have seen the extent to which the Pharma and medical community will go in order to cover up perfectly harmless and potentially helpful therapies like low-carb diets and off-label antiparisitic drugs.

The big money in cancer is treating it with expensive therapies until the patient dies, not curing it.

I think the biggest improvement in output compared to baseline humans would stem from synthesis between fields. At best a human can become a turbo-expert in a single field of study, maybe two if they're truly exceptional.

Being an expert in everything would let The Being see links between fields invisible to normal folk.

Imagine a master sculptor who's also an incredible portrait artist. Bam! Photorealistic sculptures!

It's not hard to imagine a field of maths linking closely with biology to produce statistical models for cell propagation. Multidisciplinary teams can achieve great things, but imagine that team is inside a single skull.

Good article! Mostly agree, except for cancer (I think biology research is in some way limited by capacity of keeping things in your head) and Trump win.

Especially on Trump, I feel like our society has no good models for population level behavior and information warfare. This is very hard to research, but I strongly believe there are some low hanging fruits there!

I'm not sure that thinking speed alone would give you much. If I could think 10x faster my capabilities for things like math and physics wouldn't be that much faster. I can only keep so much of a given problem in my head, so I'd still need to write things down and work through the algebra. To avoid that, I'd need a pretty massive increase in working memory, proportional to the increase in speed