Re: The Singularity

Gerhard Kessell-Haak (gerhard_kessell-haak@mail.tait.co.nz)
Wed, 22 Jul 1998 10:27:04 +1200

>>> Hal Finney <hal@rain.org> 22/July/1998 08:58am >>>
"It's an attractive analogy that a posthuman will be to a human as a human is to an insect. This suggests that any attempt to analyze or understand the behavior of post-singularity intelligence is as hopeless as it would be for an insect to understand human society. Since insects clearly have essentially no understanding of humans, it would follow by analogy that we can have no understanding of posthumans. ....."

>>>>

I've always thought that a superior analogy would be between humanity and "chimpanity" - chimpanzee's have relatively complex social behaviours, have a simple sense of self, have a primitive ability for communication, and have a simple number sense. However, humanity has developed all these abilities far beyond the capabilities of any chimpanzee. By analogy, it then seems probable that transhumans (and note that I'm not talking about SI here) will retain these abilities, though developed to a more complex level.

Caged chimpanzees can, to a certain extent, predict the behaviour of humans within their small sphere of influence (ie. within their cage), but can not even begin to fathom the deeper concepts that drive their keepers.