Given complex vertebrates what is the likelihood of abstract intelligence
Offline Let's start with a biological system that already has vertebrates. This gives us a very powerful starting point for evolution to work from. We have had complex vertebrates for at least 250 millions or so. If you look at the evolutionary history it is pretty amazing that we are the only intelligent species to arise. This would seem to have implications for the probability of intelligent life forming. The raw material for intelligence has been available for a very, very long time yet we only recently developed abstract thought. Put another way, you can look at the evolutionary record as a sort of sample space or a set of trials. We see no evidence for abstract thought until us. The fact that we have only recently formed intelligent life is additional evidence for how unlikely it is to happen.
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As I have said, something other then the period during which the genus Homo developed. Our genus had a lot of intelligence.
So you think it is likely? Rareness points to unlikely.
Your desire to form a broad equivalence class called intelligence points to your wishful thinking. Your belief system so wants us not to be unique you ignore our blatant uniqueness.
Fix your quotes and I'll respond to the rest of your post.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
In a Bayesian sense negative results is still evidence. It is still knowledge. I talked about this in the other thread.
Our samples are extremely limited - positive and negative results both.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
My point still stands, no matter how narrowly you interpret "intelligence" in my statement, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the likelihood of that intelligence arising in the first place - once we achieved the capability of carrying on high-level discussions about things, there is absolutely nothing remarkable about the fact that it did not take long, compared to the time-scale of genetic evolution, for such discussions to start happening.
It is clearly your belief-system which is far more deeply wedded to one end pf the "human level intelligence is unique / common" spectrum than is mine, as demonstrated by your refusal or inability to acknowledge the fallacy in your 'point' about how recent our development of intelligence seems to have been.
To repeat, your statement in the OP that:
is patently incorrect. Far from being "additional evidence", it is totally irrelevant. Your persistent inability to grasp this point is very revealing about your reasoning skills.
On the other point, to repeat:
I can find nowhere that you said anything I can easily map to "once Homo developed intelligence was almost a given". Can you point to which of your actual posts addressed this?
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
This was discussed multiple times. While both are very limited the new evidence is all negative.
No it does not. You are confusing true convergent evolution with homology. Your inability to distinguish important points in this thread has been peculiarly persistent.
No, it is relevant. As I pointed out there are non Christians making this point as well. Intelligent life appears to be rarer then we make believe. These conclusions are drawn from the accumulation of evidence.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
Your inability to grasp what I have been arguing here is sad, but consistent with your overall obtuseness.
The relatively short time interval between the emergence of high-level intelligence and the manifestations of that capability in terms of language and culture simply demonstrates the much faster pace of cultural or memetic evolution compared to genetic evolution is all I am pointing to, which is all that is needed to explain the fact that we are in such an advanced civilization when our intelligence evolved so recently.
How we got to the point of having the intelligence level sufficient in kind and degree for cultural evolution to 'take-off', and how improbable or not reaching such a position would be, is a separate argument, which is what would involve "convergent evolution" and "homology".
With a sample of one, all we can say, on the basis of statistics, is that it is greater than zero. That's it. Period. No assessment of uniqueness can be made at all, either way.
Even if you could justify your claim about the "accumulation of evidence", that is still totally irrelevant to my point about the fallacy in your arguing about "intelligent life" being "only recently formed" as constituting evidence for anything to do with the likelihood of such intelligent life.
You can validly argue about how long each phase of genetic evolution took, and draw implications about how likely each step was, but the final step to civilization involves little or no further genetic evolution, so it is not relevant.
If we were discussing this a million years in the future, assuming civilization as we know it survived that long, then it would no longer be 'recent', but the short time it took for civilization to emerge would still be evident, assuming we hadn't lost all the records.
I keep hammering this point because of what it reveals about the way you are arguing here, and just how much real understanding you display, or perhaps how intellectually honest you are.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
Well for one thing a lot of examples of convergent evolution come from the same developmental period, especially if we're limiting ourselves to complex vertebrates. So I think it's unfair to start comparing one species to potentially extinct species as an example of convergent evolution as they developed under vastly different conditions.
Even if we ignore my first point above, your marker for intelligence still stands as archaeological evidence. We'd be exceptionally lucky to find any archaeological evidence from a species arising before we did. If we suddenly disappeared from the planet all that would be likely to remain after 200,000 years would be traces of chemicals we'd left behind.
So how do you suggest I find an example of convergent intelligence that meets your standard, assuming our rise killed off any competitors during the Homo period and I don't have access to a time machine?
Given an evolutionary process yes I do. I don't see why intelligence is less likely to occur than wings or feet.
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss
The conclusion is that the new evidence is counter to common ETI. The more negative evidence the less likely.
The speed of cultural evolution actually counters your previous claims of a broad equivalence class of intelligence on earth. Since the point is convergent evolution has in deed been rare (as in 1 time) my case is made stronger.
You still seem to be having trouble with probability. In this case, we have a sample of N, where N is some number of complex vertebrates. The fact that any reached a point called intelligence, using your discriminator of having cultural evolution, which btw is the same as my discriminator of having archaeological evidence, has in fact been only a single case. So this does say something about the probability.
This of course is silly, since behind every phenotype is a genotype.
Comparing niche conditions is done all the time. The science is called Ecology.
Intelligence, as we demonstrate it, leaves the best archeological evidence of all.
Wings have evolved more then one once - convergently.
new evidence = just a sliver teeny bit more
tiny, itsy-bitsy, sample = no valuable conclusions
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
You really should take the time to understand things before trying to be condescending.
You need to read the thread closer. The default assumption is always that ETI exists. More over, there is often uber positive optimism. The negative evidence is "itsy-bitsy" in your eyes, probably because you don't understand it. The negative evidence even if it is small still allows us to dump the uber optimism, and it does in fact allow us to become even more skeptical of life's existence. Especially when contrasted with the positive evidence.
If you think the sample is at all significant, then you don't have the first clue about how large the universe is.
Deep-fried christ on a stick with ketchup and mustard, OC, try harder to see what's actually being said without coloring it with your bigoted expectations.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
You still don't seem to understand a Bayesian process. You start with priors and work from there. Many seem to have unwarranted priors.
And don't try and shift the goalposts - I don't care if there are many who think extraterrestrial life is likely or not. They don't have any more evidence than the "lone life" folks.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
OC...just wanted to keep this alive. I will get back to a response for you. Been a bit busy the past few days.
M
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss
Based on empirical data, the odds seem to be 1/1. We have one planet with vertebrate life, and it has creatures capable of abstract thinking.
-Triften
The part that ignores priors.
Negative evidence is evidence. Just because you feel it suites your argument to call it "itys-bitys" does not mean it is not meaningful evidence.
Are you talking about odds for ETI or intelligent life on our planet? In either case you have the population wrong so your ratio is wrong.
I'm talking about the odds that vertebrate life leads to creatures abstract thinking. The odds seem to be 1, given that we have a single example of a planet with complex vertebrates and that planet also contains creatures capable of abstract thinking.
-Triften
You are mixing up the two questions: life on planets and life on earth. With life on planets the population is all planets. With life on earth the population is the set of evolved species. I used vertebrates to restrict that population because of the large brain needed to contain intelligence and vertebrates have a bony brain case to protect such a thing. I'm basically saying intelligence is conditional on vertebrates.
In either case your ratio is wrong because your choice of population (denominator) was set at 1, which is not correct.
I am saying it's insufficient for any meaningful conclusion: We have a good idea of the number of samples possible versus the number of samples we have. We do not have a conclusive sample size by any stretch of the imagination by the very rules of Bayesian statistical theory.
We have exactly one example of tool-using intelligent life out of a known 4 planets and other bodys that might be able to support life (and one we know does) out of a roughly estimated 200x101111 planets in the known universe (and who knows how much more out where the EM will never get here).
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
The meaningful conclusion is that it is less likely then we thought and the trend is continuing in the negative direction. In your world we will never have enough evidence to make any conclusions regarding ET short of discovering it, which is non-sensical.
No one with even an inkling of how the process works considers that a valid population to consider. I knew you had not read the thread. Read the thread and read the posts I posted. The probability of life and ETI is a conditional probability.
The response to the OP is still only "greater than zero", if we purely base it on statistics.
You should have included a time period as part of the question. IOW, "what is the likelihood of .... within a period of N million years", for various values of N, then you would have a more properly defined question.
In the absence of inter-galactic travel a la Star Trek, meaningful answers to such a question can only be approached by detailed study of the data we have here on Earth, regarding the mechanisms of evolution, genetics, and comparing the various examples we have of significant intelligence in different lineages, such as cetaceans, birds, cephalopods, and mammals, and within mammals, examples such as elephants, primates, and ourselves.
Which has been underway for some time, of course.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
Please show us how using statistics you drew your conclusion. Inference never came into the discussion. Even not using inference we can get more information then "greater then zero".
I did base it on a period of years. Read the OP.
You did not make it explicitly part of the question - you mentioned 250 million years as part of our current data set.
So I assume you are asking what is the a priori likelihood that within 250 million years after the emergence of vertebrates, intelligence comparable to ours will develop. That would be a more precise formulation of your OP.
I never mentioned inference either.
We have an sample of one. Please show me how you can apply statistics here to go beyond "greater than zero".
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
To be honest I don't think you understand what this thread is about. I did not ask anything.
This is what I thought. Did you just throw in the word "statistics" for dramatic effect. Descriptive statistics alone provide you with nothing here.
You can use the entire set of species trials to produce a prior for Bayesian inference(you could even use this as a subjective "feel" for the probability on its own). You can break the set of species trials into a set of samples and use normal inference techniques.
Demonstrate it, with the proper math and data summary, or kindly admit you're defending a baseless presupposition.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
You might have a better chance of getting Clay to give you a straight answer if you use your lasso of truth!
... or was that wonder woman?
Ah what the hell... have at it, none the less!
What Would Kharn Do?
You are letting your frustration cloud your understanding. You are denying the very existence of any meaningful negative evidence so why would showing any math do any good. You are just trying to shuffle around the point that you are unwilling to admit that meaningful negative evidence exists. Math has no meaning unless one understands the principles of its use.
Clearly others have demonstrated it for me. How you could even remotely believe that any planet can contain life is beyond my ability to comprehend. Even the most optimistic SETI crowd understands this is not the case. Again, this was discussed in the thread. You are grasping at straws.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
The title of the thread is a question. You then suggest that the answer is "very low". So the only way I can see to make sense of what you expect in response (very often far from obvious with your threads, as others have often noted) is that you expect us to attempt to justify alternative answers to the title question.
I will concede I may have had too much in my mind your previous thread on SETI.
So you are proposing that the sample space is the 'set of species trials', I see,
Except that that is not a good model of the evolutionary process, to think of it as discrete number of speciation events considered as random trials.
It is a much more continuous process than that, with random variation happening more or less continuously and only giving rise to what we post facto classify as separate species when some sub-populations find themselves sufficiently separated to reduce the amount of genetic interchange between them for genetic drift combined with whatever selective pressures are present to lead to sufficient divergence, for them to be considered separate species.
There is strong support for the argument that changes of climate had a strong influence on our development path in particular, as a drying period lead to replacement of jungle with savannah, so a population evolved for living in trees found a new niche by adapting to a ground-based life style, which may have favored the bipedal mode of moving around, freeing our hands for manipulation of objects, ultimately encourage the development of tools, and so on.
I would see studying things like these sequences of environmental changes, being more significant to our understanding of how likely was the development of the key features of our own species, than looking at things from the perspective of speciation 'trials'. The continuous process of generation-to-generation variation provides the raw material to allow new ecological niches and survival strategies to be discovered and utilized. Separation into non-interbreeding groups (the fundamental pre-condition for speciation) assists by limiting any tendency of new capabilities to be diluted by cross-breeding with groups not sharing the new attributes. It really becomes important in allowing the full development of specific strategies.
Given that our existence and apparent success (so far) proves there is at least one valid evolutionary survival strategy based on developing higher cognitive abilities, the only question is how hard was it to find a step-wise path, through viable intermediates, from a population lacking any specific strengths in such directions, to our level of ability.
I really don't see the relevance of your approach to actually understanding how we got here, or how likely it was.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
Just repeating yourself did not add anything to your argument. I realize it may make you feel better, kind of like word tag in grammar school, but it does not change the fact that what I said was true.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
The title of the thread is "Given complex vertebrates what is the likelihood of abstract intelligence"... the answer, based on evidence is 1. Or do you want some probability of abstract thought developing per year?
The population is not "all planets". The given is "complex vertebrates" which restricts the population to 1 planet, the only one we know which has complex vertebrates on it.
And if what you're saying is "intelligence is conditional on vertebrates", then say so. What evidence do you have to back up that statement?
-Triften
It's my understanding that ecology covers the study of the individual and their interactions within a population and an environment, with the specific filed of evolutionary ecology looking at the interactions between species during their evolutionary history.
I don't see how this field would help me compare the homo genus against a species outside our own developmental period, when we'd have no evidence for how they interacted with their environment. Which brings me to my next point.
Did you even read my statement? We have been developing for 200,000 years. Almost all traces of our existance, save a few chemicals, would disappear from the earth within that same timespan if we were all to leave the planet today. The same would be true for any intelligence that had reached the same level as ours before we developed. If there were an intelligent species in our past we'd be hard pressed to find evidence for them.
I feel that the argument here is in danger of being sidetracked and becoming very fuzzy so I'll try and pull it together.
You have stated you find it remarkable that it has taken so long for a species capable of leaving archaeological evidence to arise. The main prop you're using for your argument is that there are no examples of convergent evolution of similar intelligence.
I've given you a couple of admittedly speculative reasons as to why we may have eliminated the competition during our own rise to prominence.
You've then asked for examples outwith our own developmental period, which is something I'm trying to tell you would be very hard to do.
I think we should focus on this and I'll adress the following point in a different response.
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss
Ecology tells us how biology interacts and fills niches. We know energy rich (adequate for intelligence) niches existed for the entire period vertebrates have existed. In other words ecology tells us that the environmental opportunity existed.
We have worked out our evolutionary lineage because of the very important fact that our lineage has left evidence of intelligence. Given that once intelligence reaches a certain point the evidence explodes it is absurd to think it would not be found.
Jill makes a good point. It's fine to throw math words around, but making a case for something involving math usually involves actual math.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Actually it was a non point. Math is far more then numbers. It is an abstraction of thought using formal constructions. Thought can often be expressed using language very effectively. In fact, unless rigor is required, language almost always provides a more intuitive understanding.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
But you haven't done that, either. So Jill's point stands.
Saying "In a Bayesian sense, my evidence is sufficient" isn't much of an argument unless you elaborate.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
So the argument now is that human intelligence is amazing because it took "so long" to develop when the ecological opportunity had existed for that extended period? We're almost coming back to the same argument here - intelligence, as you've defined it, is not a requirement of complex vertebrates or high energy systems. Just because an opportunity exists doesn't mean it has to be taken.
And this is becoming circular too. You asked about the development of an intelligent species outside the developmental period of the Homo Genus. Please tell me what evidence you would expect to find. Buildings? Tools? Some invulnerable magic materials that would have survied the 200,000+ years of Homo Sapien development, or the 2.5 million years of the development of the Homo Genus? How many of our tools do you think aliens will find after we've been extinct for 200,000 years? 2.5 million years?
Expecting clear evidence of an intelligence that existed outside the developmental period of the Homo Genus is frankly ridiculous. Things crumble to dust if you hadn't noticed.
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss