<man's cranial "hardware" was pretty much the same 10000 years ago as it is now, and what has changed is not our actual intelligence, but our access to information, which is increasing at exponential rates. >
Rambi, that was an interesting post. I think you are up with the play. Not in the sense of leading the charge, but in the sense:
Some people make things happen.
Some watch what happens.
Some wonder what happened.
I don't accept the idea that our brains are much the same as even 100 years ago, let alone 10,000.
It's true that the actual gene pool might not have swarms of new genes which weren't in there. I doubt even that, but accept that the mutation rate forming new genes means that 10,000 years isn't a lot compared with 2,000,000 years. But the mutation rate is also a function of how many opportunities there are.
Now there are 6 billion of us. That's a LOT of mutation opportunities. 100,000 years ago, the number of humans was few. I suppose a few million. So the mutation rate was much lower for the whole gene pool. Now it's like a pressure cooker with a seething morass of genes being mutated, blended and reblended in a mating frenzy with no geographical isolation.
In the past, genes were geographically restricted with tribal warfare at the edges. Now it's one big melting pot. Okay, not completely, with places like Japan being 99% pure. But there's a lot of miscegenation.
More important than the creation of the DNA, is the blending and concentration of the good genes. The Einstein gene might have existed 100,000 years ago [or it might not], but there might have been only one person with it. They might have been given the job of stone grinder. Also, that person might have lacked a memory gene which had just been formed on the other side of the world, in a person who was taught to be a sex toy for the chief's entertainment.
The gene pool at the time would have looked much the same as now, with an identical skull size. But over the next millennia, those successful genes spread and also combined with others such as attention span, longevity and so on. The other genes would be filtered out.
As you have seen in your time on Earth, there is a lot of filtering still to be done. There is a lot of blending still to be done too.
So the process is not going slowly, it's going faster than ever. By a LOT.
But then, in the past few centuries, with the advent of writing and communications, things sped up. Not only were the genes coalescing and filtering, the software was developing as you say. But in an omigod phase, which we entered in the past 20 years and especially in the last 10 years, that communication process went berserk. As did the extra-somatic memory of umpty billion memory chips and storage methods.
We are witnessing nothing less than the construction of a monstrously huge, powerful and fast, global extra-somatic brain. AND it will THINK. Brains sense, remember and think, feed back to the surroundings and re-iterate again. They usually die and the whole difficult business has to start again. ASICs don't die. Fibre can be replaced.
We are witnessing exponential growth. What matters is the exponent. This is NOT a small exponent. [Talking dirty maths talk here to bamboozle CB] We have got a confluence of exponential effects all happening simultaneously. Population growth peaking, genetic mixing coming into its own, mutation rate at an all time record, AND technlogy getting going in a big way. Each is synergistic with the other. The effect is a monstrous tsunami of brain.
If I was superstitious, I'd say we are witnessing the second coming. It doesn't arrive on a mountain top. It arrives from the inside, magically imbibed from the outside. It is us transformed but with a new form created by us in a symbiotic two-headed [or more actual dual-brained] giant. One brain is the human, the other the machine.
I suspect the human will become irrelevant, just as chimps were our siblings, and the template from which we appeared, but became irrelevant to us [we don't give them Xmas presents - though Michael Jackson probably does give one a gift].
It's a lot of fun.
I agree with the 3D stuff too. Our brains like 3D. Our whole visual and aural perceptions are 3D. We have a 3D model of the world in our heads. I think that's why murder on TV doesn't seem real, even if it is. See it in 3D and it can properly record in our brains.
Artificial 3D could mess us up a lot. We won't know what's real. We'll go insane. There will be laws passed!
That's my theory. It fits the facts. Check out the Flynn Effect to see what's happening to brain power, even in 100 years. Ask Google! Google knows. Smarty pants that "they" are. Or It is.
One other thing, it's weird that we can be living at such a spectacularly phenomenal time and we seem to barely notice it, going about our lives as though nothing's happening. There's an ephemeral frisson of interest at each new thing, but it's soon subsumed into prosaic daily life as though it's always been.
Mqurice
PS: Well, that's 5.20am insomnia, so I'd better go zizzo again. That'll teach me not to turn the computer on instead of getting a drink of water and going straight back to sleep.
PS2: You can see reassortment and recombining of genes in the viral world, where H5N1 avian flu and human influenza might combine to kill a billion of us. There will be no new genes, just a filtering, blending and proliferation of the 'right ones'. Okay, it's not intelligence, but murder, but it works and helps the genes earn a living. They end up with a population which can carry them and the humans take over from those who don't have the resistant genes - it's a kind of good guy bad guy onslaught against the innocent and helpless. Germ warfare on a grand scale. recombinomics.com |
