Great summary and I like the take on transhumanism's vision being very much like soviet central control - it's gota end badly!
The point about knocking out genes for eyes and the reappearance of eyes in only a few generations is stunning - leaving Darwinism struggling for any response.
There's a lot to say about evolution as well, as much as McGilchrist seems to love Darwin's theory, it is on this point that I have to depart from McGilchrists understanding. I'm with you on the Intelligent Design (I've gleaned a lot from David Belinski's arguments against evolution), yet, unlike Belinski, I go further and, at risk of alienating myself from most of the scientific community (of today, not of yesteryear), believe there is a God who both created and sustains life.
In my view, ID via cellular intelligence doesn't obviate God. If mind goes all the way down, then by extension it goes all the way up. It's the distinction between theism (there's a God), pantheism (everything in its totality is God), and panentheism (God is in everything). The latter formulation strikes me as the most consistent.
Jun 23, 2022·edited Jun 23, 2022Liked by John Carter
Great piece. "The river’s behaviour is governed by the laws of physics, and conforms itself to the environment, just as organisms are and do." Bruce Lee's quantum encrypted neuralink to human civilization "Be like water."
The Good Citizen has a similar flare for storytelling, wouldn’t it be interesting if the three of us exchanged “letters” from our three distinctly different parts of the world and from a distant future we can extrapolate from today’s trajectory? Would that be both fun and instructive for us and our readership?
I'll just add that one thing that bugs me about the ID crowd is that they see things in a very left-brain, mechanistic way. For them too, we're just very (irreducibly) complex machines. I tried to present a version of the "it's the cell's own intelligence, stupid!" argument on an episode of MindMatters (inspired partly by Perry Marshall's work, plus David Ray Griffin's). Think it was this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDY4joXlJkw&t=795s&ab_channel=MindMatters
Totally agree. They need more atheists/agnostics/heck, they need some gnostics thrown in there too. But they're so focused on their goal of convincing the "scientific community" that they never really let their imaginations run wild. (And when they do, the results tend to be limited to the God-the-watchmaker-did-it.) We need an "intellectual dark web" equivalent of panpsychists, parapsychologists, and mad physicists to give the ID crowd some color.
I've been saying this for years! This is one of the more subtle, but profound, detriments of the ideological straightjacket arising from the academic demand for "respectability". I know quite a few scientists who privately voice vehement disagreement with the crude materialist monism of the official ideology, but don't dare contradict it in public lest they be thought mad.
There's a profound link between this, the speech codes of woke, and, I suspect, the dead prose of scientific papers.
I often think that the "dead prose" is a ruse to stop you reading past the abstract and discovering how flimsy the lengthier argument really is. Kind of why the Dog Park Rape paper had that air of authenticity.
Indeed. As papers get ridiculously long and ridiculously poorly written, I increasingly think that it is to reinforce the tendency to just read the intro and the conclusion and ignore the rest.
I'm a God-the-much-more-than-a-watchmaker-did-it kinda guy. But I really appreciate agnostics like David Berlisnski and the both-feet-in-Darwin's-camp McGilchrists of the world, and whatever you and John Carter believe. I think we can have some very fruitful discussions and explorations, even with people like me who believe "God did it" - no dark web required - just honest, open, and respectful debate and discussion. Again, something inconceivable to the left hemisphere alone, but a joy to the balanced brain.
I'm a bit of both. So far I like David Ray Griffin's presentation of Whitehead and Hartshorne's theology the best, which has a role for God and creatures' own creativity. Top-down, God provides the teloi or attractors to which creatures are pulled, which they feel as value, and use their own self-creativity to manifest those ends and incorporate them into themselves. So evolution requires both poles and directions, top-down and bottom-up.
Transhumanism is just a toxic distillation of the Baconian project of mastering nature, but it lacks the nuance, wonder and subtlety of that tradition. In this, transhumanism is consistent with liberalism, which is derived from the Enlightenment but has become morbid and and extreme now that it is no longer constrained by the context in which it first emerged. Over time ideas become simplified, then crudified and ultimately transform into absurdities because the context necessary to understand what they first meant is no longer accessible.
"I am very sure that you’ve felt the inner discomfort of selfish poo yearning to break free." 😂😂😂😂 Thank you! I needed a laugh!
"The trillions of cells making up the human body are really trillions of little minds."
This reminds me of an experience I had 22 years ago, while rafting the Grand Canyon. I neglected to gorge on potato chips my 1st night camping & woke up very ill. Guides were sure it was dehydration, but water wouldn't stay down. I was sure electrolytes, so they relented & gave me some.
I could feel the desperate cells in my stomach soaking it up. And I could feel gratitude. But it wasn't "my" gratitude. It was the cell's gratitude to me. I swear I could feel *their* gratitude, could feel, practically hear, them thanking me.
Yes, our cells as trillions of little minds makes perfect sense to me!
This is why embodied experience - including deprivation and injury - is so crucial to self-understanding. When everything's ticking along nicely, and you're sitting in your comfy chair in a warm haze of Netflix and cheap carbs, you don't notice your body. Under such circumstances it's much easier to think of it as a machine.
Acupuncture is based on ancient observations that our bodies are structured in ways not understood by modern medical science. Spark In The Machine is an interesting analysis of the connections between ancient and modern science.
The assumption that a coercive planning apparatus is needed or desirable smacks of LHB dominant thinking! Human consciousness being emergent from the cooperative interactions of intelligence at every level is not consistent with an institution being given a monopoly on force to serve a parallel function at the societal level. When coercion enters the equation, it does so to enforce the will of planners on other organisms who hold information that would compel them not to comply if not for the threat of violence. Apply the principles you outline consistently, and you will be a free market ideologue. Planning can and will happen on a societal level as emergent phenomena. Force may be involved, just as there is conflict at the cellular level, but human consciousness doesn't have a monopoly on force for its constituent cells, flora ,and fauna. It has some influence and authority, but only that authority granted by nature. Any planner must derive it's authority from voluntary association and cooperation if we want the best information to be applied to each decision. In an economy this information is typically communicated as prices, but there is way more depth than that which will always been invisible to central planners hoping to wield coercion to the benefit of society (in their misguided minds, they will always wield it to the benefit of themselves first and foremost). If government exists, we simply must understand that everything that it does perverts the natural order of the ecosystem. Early Americans widely understood that the legitimacy of law was nested with its support of natural law. Is getting to Mars "best"? If it really is, we'll get to Mars faster with a free market.
Maybe. This is something I haven't come to a firm conclusion on as of yet. For one thing, it's difficult to extricate a market from a state - the state enforces the rules (eg don't steal) that enable the market to exist. Of course you can argue that trade existed before the state, and this is true; but even at the most primitive level, it relies on the parties sharing a mutual understanding that it is easier and cheaper to trade than it is to simply take. History shows that the moment the calculus changes, plunder replaces barter.
To my mind, the coordination problem relies on letting problems be dealt with at their appropriate levels. High level goals are set, by whatever mechanism; but the details are left to be handled at the level at which they exist. The reason central planning in its extreme form fails so spectacularly is that it attempts to perform all decision making at the same level, with the result that a myriad of unexpected problems arise that the small number of people in charge simply can't deal with. The problem is then exacerbated when those further down the chain start feeding bad information up the chain, because they realize it's much easier to 'achieve' their increasingly absurd goals by lying about their activities.
On the other hand, to push all decision making to the lowest level goes too far in the opposite direction. The capacity for coordination is impeded. History is replete with examples of fractured tribal peoples being easily conquered and absorbed by more unified states, and it's not always been a question of a steep technological gradient.
The principle I think should be that if a problem can be solved at a lower level, it should be; following from this, rights and responsibilities are distributed as widely as possible; but it also follows that society requires organs capable of solving problems at higher levels, too. So for example, an invasion by a foreign power implies a high level goal (surviving the invasion and expelling the invaders), which undoubtedly requires a degree of coordination in order to deploy forces to their best strategic effect; but on the other hand, at the tactical level, officers and individual soldiers must be capable of handling the exigencies of the battlefield, defending against unexpected threats and taking advantage of unexpected opportunities. If the generals micromanage the soldiers, depriving them of all initiative, their military culture will become dumb and unresponsive; if the soldiers don't listen to the officers, they degenerate into a mob and get defeated in detail.
Jun 24, 2022·edited Jun 24, 2022Liked by John Carter
The market doesn't exist because of the state, it exists in spite of it. For a deep look at the praxeological basis for this assertion see Rothbard's Power and Market. There are several assumptions that you're making about where decisions would be made in a free market that I don't think you can take for granted.
->to push all decision making to the lower level goes too far in the opposite direction.
A free market wouldn't necessarily do this. In a free market, hierarchies would form, there would still be an elite, there would still be law, and there would still be enforcement of law, it would just be provided by the market. Attempting to describe how this would occur on a granular level is the same folly of applying the mechanical model to biology. The market designs itself, any attempts to interfere by say, imposing a monopoly on force, is analogous to applying transhumanism in the biological context. I also question the assumption that the state is necessary to protect property rights by making it more difficult for people to acquire what they desire via cooperation over coercion. The state being institutionalized coercion, we see that it makes it much easier for the worst of us to acquire what we desire by leveraging the "legitimized" coercive apparatus of this institution. Of course, certain technologies help favor cooperation over coercion, but we have those technologies in spades. American culture is one such technology. Widespread firearm possession is another. Violence is very expensive. The idea that it would be easier to get what you want with violence over cooperation ignores the tremendous costs of violence in terms of risk exposure. Government is the most effective institution in history towards collateralizing the risk of initiating violence and concentrating benefits to achieve your desired ends. Whether this is directly through money printing (which diminishes the purchasing power of everyone holding dollars, but how can we ever hold anyone accountable for this theft?) or indirectly with the creation of black markets where the premium prices of prohibited goods and services attract those that are willing to assume the increased risk associated with the violence that will exists in such spaces, or anything in between, I think it is clear that if we want to encourage cooperation over coercion, the state can only help nominally, and in practice it shifts the balance towards more coercion.
In the most highly functioning military units soldiers don't follow orders because of the coercive that can be levied against them if they disobey, they follow orders because they trust their officers/leaders. The fact that this doesn't seem to be understood by our military and political leadership supports the position you took in your essay about how we can't win WWIII.
To tie it back to McGilchrist's work, it seems like he is helping us understand that our conception of the source of consciousness is flawed (if applying computational theory of mind/a mechanistic approach). It is a complex, emergent phenomenon with multi-directional relationships between causes and effects. Transhumanism interferes with these processes in ways that are not likely to contribute to the flourishing of the organism or the harmonious flow of the consciousness. Planning, if backed by coercion/the state will have a similarly predictable influence in impeding the harmonious flow of society.
I guess I'd point to what's happening in American cities, where law enforcement has been effectively withdrawn and shoplifting is making retail commerce untenable. Of course, you could argue that a market system could provide security able to deal with such problems; but then there's the question of, what is an appropriate response? Does the drug store hire mercenaries to shoot at shoplifters? Do they just kick them out? What sets the level of force they're authorized to use?
Similarly with the black market. In this case, by banning something, the protections offered by the legal system are removed. Cartels have no means of adjuticating disputes peacefully, so theyn invariably resort to violence. There's no question that the state causes black markets by banning commerce of certain items. However, a total withdrawal of the state from the market seems like it would turn everything into a de facto black market. You end up with Somalia.
You're absolutely correct about the military. Officers who rely on coercion tend to make poor leaders. It's much the same with the state, though. "Do what I say or I'll shoot you" isn't nearly as effective as getting people to voluntarily follow directions because they understand and support the goal, and believe you know how to get everyone there. On the other hand, though, soldiers also don't tend to respect officers who they don't think will come down like a ton of bricks on them if they fuck around or slack off. Tough but fair generally gets the best response.
I think a lot of the problems we have now are because, for obvious reasons, no one trusts or believes in the people running the state; which for its part becomes increasingly coercive as its own incompetence has eroded its ability to elicit voluntarily compliance.
In the cities you mention the government still has a monopoly on force, so the market is very constrained and can't "flow" appropriately to meet the demand for security. What makes the black market violent is that it is operating willfully outside of the rules established by the state, and this includes the monopoly on force. Without prohibition and a monopoly on force to enforce such a prohibition, there would still be a black market, because market provided law would still prohibit things, but that gets to be complicated topic on private law. The point I was trying to get across is that violence is expensive, cartels can afford to pay the high prices of violence due to the high premiums afforded to prohibited goods and services (i.e. drugs and prostitution). Without the prohibition, violence becomes too expensive to be sustained systematically within an enterprise. I attribute the problems Somalia (and many other 3rd world countries with rapidly rotating leadership) to programs like U.S. Aid. I've mentioned the cost of violence, well, how is being a warlord in Somalia affordable? While I'm no expert, I see 2 obvious sources. 1st, western governments provided an enormous cash prize (we call it foreign aid) to whichever strongman can claim a monopoly on force within Somalia. Would it matter who the "leader" was if there wasn't a big pot of money that came along with the title? I think not. The other reason probably has to do with piracy and a lack of clearly delineated property rights in the waters around the horn of Africa. I blame western governments for both of these issues, and I argue that the volatility of the region flows from the associated incentives.
Enlistment being what it is there is room to be tough without violating trust. They all did swear to obey the officers appointed over them (at least in the US), and as we like to say serving is a privilege not a right. Market defense would be a little more flexible, because the best course of action for bad faith lazy soldiers would be to just fire them, but that again is an entirely different topic that could be speculated on at length.
I'm not sure the people running the state ever deserved trust, and a lack of trust might provide the pressure needed to reign in a government that has grown to be, lets say inconsistent with the principles that formed it. It has long applied coercion to sectors of the economy in relative silence depending on Gell-Mann amnesia on the part of everyone who notices to keep up the illusion that it doesn't fuck up everything it touches. This has been made more obvious with COVID.
Note that the government enforces rules against law abiding store owners more severely than the robbers. Store owners absolutely could protect against theft, but are liable both civilly and criminally if they try.
Also, black markets work a lot better than people tend to think. Somalia also did better relative to its neighbors after the state fell; Peter Leeson had a good paper on that.
The big mistake is to think that the government is the only source of governance, and that first party enforcement doesn’t do the heavy lifting when it comes to crime prevention. Our cities made that mistake and criminalized first party enforcement, and look where they are.
I've a different vision of the future, more true to my namesake...
"I can see a future where my great-grandson, hunted like a thief, is galloping across the veldt on the back of his crimson velociraptor Mars, with one hand clutching Mars's mane of azure feathers while with his other (an elaborate cybernetic limb built from asteroid-mined steel and inlaid with a filigree of asteroid-mined gold), he fires his terrawatt gamma ray rifle over his shoulder as he desperately tries to keep the WHO’s security drones from getting close enough to drop a nerve net on him and his trusty steed. "Goddamnit", he neuralinks to his girlfriend across a quantum-encrypted channel, "You said your father wasn’t one of them!"
Excellent frame shift. I can see that too - but worth noting is that if he's riding a dinosaur and armed with a ray gun, the WEF's domination is far from total.
Amazing piece, John. Love the Shitlection line of thought; there is SO much wrong with evolutionary thinking, especially when based on machine models, although the ID crowd has its own issues IMO. Perhaps I'll take your piece here as an inspiration for one of my next ones.
Love it - Klaus Schwab’s pet psychotic nerd Yuval Harari. A very apt description and an interesting article. Will be linking tomorrow @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
If nature is inherently intelligent (I call it ‘love’, the force that attracts, antithesis of entropy) how can we be sure that its overarching motive—one beyond our comprehension—isn’t ultimately the creation of synthetic life with rigid centralized control systems, etc. as the ultimate destination?
I suppose one answer might be centralized systems are weak and inherently unstable making autonomy the emergent behavior—the eyes on the proverbial fruit fly. Perhaps its unreasonable to suspect life is more than a setup to some galactic mega-joke.
I often try to think about what levels of intelligence exist above our own and what the ‘goal’ of the universe might be. I suspect there’s more going on than just endless expansion and entropic death. For humans it’s much more simple: Dyson Sphere, FTL space flight or bust. 🚀
I guess the answer would be similar to the the answer of: will the Sun come up tomorrow? Maybe it won't but it always has before. Similarly, maybe life is heading in that direction, but so far, it has not favored that at any point in the past.
There's also the argument from physics: speed of light limitation + no preferred reference frame means that the universe has no central point of control. There are obvious implications for systems architecture, given that basic physical structure.
Very nice piece. The fact that all life is intelligent is a greatly underestimated and undervalued epistemology. I appreciate how you approached the topic here. Likewise I appreciate how you separated that intelligence from the higher. Elsewhere I have suspected that this intelligent mech suit we have.. our body.. ( in light of this article my intention was not to imply it was robotic per se) is to act as a vessel for that higher intelligence, either as a receiver of OR an emergent force. With all of that said, it is a curious thing how "As above, so below" fits into our reality, from the quantum to whatever is above what we are. Reality is far more remarkable than we can possibly understand. Transhumanists are boring, short sighted and unimaginative.
The discrepancy between the promised technologies and their implication and the reality of the technology and it's implication is a big fat elephant that just won't leave.The promise was basically deus ex - be stronger,faster,smarter along with having new senses and abilities- the reality is some form of a cyber zombie that's faster and better at lining up for the new vax or supporting the Current Thing.The technology is being funneled and in some cases deliberately supressed to achieve a very specific version of whatever infrastructure they need to more effectively control people.Do you really want google in your head? Forget the conspiratorial stuff,having to pay for ad free thinking is absolutely going to become the norm.Having a chip in you that can cause hallucinations both auditory and visual,can set off inflamations and illnesses as well as just tell your brain to turn your heart off is a grim reality that the masses are heading toward.Not that I believe it'll actually get there mind,the tower of babel being an archetypal example of exactly this type of elite and their consequences.Maybe we're not meant to all be the same?Perhaps mankind is meant to have vastly different people and cultures and races,which is not something that ever occurs to those building the tower.
Looking at hillarious futurist predictions of the past and where the tech would be by now versus where it is and how it's used almost makes me nostalgic for those feelings of optimism one has in the halcyon days of one's teens.Like you I don't have any problem with the technology itself,it's inevitable really.Exciting even.But having psychopathic controllers at the helm makes any kind of a optimistic future with it impossible.
Usually, producing other organisms - the old "a chicken is an egg's way to produce other eggs".
That's if it's left up to the organism itself - obviously a beef cow doesn't really *want* to be a machine to turn feed into meat, but that's what happens when cows don't have guns, or thumbs, or access to the writings of Frédéric Bastiat.
The 'problem' with 'organisms' is that until very recently the whole shebang gets cobbled together through a bunch of random mutations and accidentally-discovered symbioses (Proto-eukaryotes had some bad bacterial take-out, and Hey presto! Eukaryotes have mitochondria now).
Selective breeding (by humans, of livestock) has shown that desired alterations can happen on much shorter timescales if you learn how to target desirable features (which are not necessarily features that the livestock themselves would choose, if given their druthers).
So as organisms sticky-tape non-lethal mutations together and become more complex, their 'purpose' - producing other [very-nearly-identical] organisms - happens in a slapdash way, that may or may not include complaining about Substack's absolutely SHIT comment 'system'.
Also... I would be very circumspect when a piece relies on two people - Hoffman and McGilchrist - and then when you dig into their bio, turn out to be psychosophasters (Hoffman is one of these people who nowadays 'identify' as something like 'cognitive scientist' because people now understand that anything with "psych" in the name is indistinguishable from pulled-out-of-my-arse high-V charlatanry).
Also, it's a hard NO to the whole "No 'off switch' for organisms". That's as bad as "psychosophaster who makes reference to quantum physics in their high-V stream-of-sentience."
Because Nature in all her glory shows us that "No 'off switch' for organisms" is bullshit.
Consider Rana Sylvatica, who can freeze solid and unfreeze without adverse effects.
Those frogs look pretty 'switched off' to the observer, so OOPS!
And they switch back on... DOUBLE OOPS!
We'll have to wait until some high-V psychocharlatan writes a journal article (which, in Psych-related fields, is epistemically indistinguishable from a blog post) titled
>>> "Rana Sylvatica: ACK-shually, they're not switched off AS SUCH..."
In the Journal of Inumerate Hand-waving Word Salad.
It'll read like the one about the 'miracle' of the behaviour of immune-system cells - "there's just GOTTA be some élan vital because we can't see quorum signalling on fMRI". Yeah, NOPE.
There MUST be both an OFF and ON switch, because those sly little Kermit motherfuckers switch on and off as if by a thermostat.
And if it's possible in Rana sylvatica, it's possible.
It's not a functionality that we Homo Sapiens Sapiens have managed to develop - we didn't get the set of random mutations that enables us to freeze and unfreeze. We might be able to shoe-horn it in, once we better-understand how our shit works (we don't understand it very well, but we've only really been trying for half a century: give us time and the gaps - and the gods and their mysterious ways - disappear).
Instead we got a different set (about 61 mya), that disabled l-gulono-lactone oxidase (GLO)... which in turn switched off autonomous production of Vitamin C. That gives us all scurvy unless we get it from our diet.
So much for "Intelligent" Design; whoever's doing the designing is a retard.
That said... I like the shit analogy. It squares nicely with my favourite shit-based apophthegm (one I've mentioned before: Bias of Priene's "Most people are shit"... HOI PLEISTOI ANTHROPOI KAKOI; 2500 years of being right, and still going strong).
That's a reasonable statement of the conventional view. However, you seem to have missed my point, which is that singling out one of the capabilities of organisms - reproduction - as the "purpose", is entirely arbitrary. Organisms do a lot of things. Reproduction is just one of them.
McGilchrist is indeed a psychologist. And? My own background is in the hard sciences; I've yet to read him talking bullshit on any subject I know well. I rather suspect you're not familiar with his work and arguments; if you were, you'd be rather more circumspect yourself.
As to freezing - this doesn't work universally, and it's far from obvious that it works indefinitely. Is it a full stop, that can be restarted at any arbitrary point in the future? Or a drastic slowing of the metabolism?
I guess it's a question of semantics: does 'purpose' imply conscious intent towards a goal? (if Substack's comment 'system' wasn't such 3rd-rate shit, 'conscious intent' and 'goal' would have been italicised).
Or maybe 'purpose' implies "what this thing mostly does, if it doesn't get eaten first" - which is a much lower bar that gets rid of stuff like "free will" and "consciousness", and closes the door on exceptionalists who think that human cognition has 'qualia' that *jes' cain't be beat* (all italics on that to indicate vernacular).
This gets to one of my pet peeves - that what we know at any specific point in time (about almost anything of consequence) is definitive and [mostly-]correct, and that 'public intellectuals' (gack!) aren't just making shit up on the fly to bank book advances.
(FWIW: I'm not a fan of Nick Bostrom either. His entire schtick can be boiled down to "There's no market for not catastrophising", which is the same schtick as Neil Ferguson from ICL - the charlatan who did the 'forecasts' for COVID, having fucked up forecasts for every infectious disease since the mid-90s. Bostrom's smarter by at least σ, so his schtick is better disguised).
Anyhoooo... what exactly anyone means when they say 'purpose', can be the subject of semantic arguments - along the same lines as what anyone means when they say "mechanism" (or "machine", or cognates). We're not rivers or lava flows, and we're not desktop PCs or (gack) iThings.
The question is perhaps better put as "Can human-level cognition be replicated in some combination of hardware and software? If so, what sort of 'personality' should we expect?"
Thing is though: to replicate function that we're interested in, history has shown that the best solution is - absolutely certainly - NOT to 'mimic' the 'best' natural examples we observe.
We didn't get high-performance flying machines by copying peregrine falcons; we didn't get high-performance land machines by making a thing that looks like an inbred lanky feline with spots.
In both cases, we dug up some special dirt; melted it and shaped it into relevant shapes; refined some brown ooze; put the refined ooze in a chamber; and made a series of [controlled] explosions. Nothing remotely like a cat or a bird, at literally any level of organisation.
And so it will be in the quest to replicate - and exceed - human cognition: in fact my long-standing bet (since 1998) is that a sapient entity will emerge from within our existing network.
I'm not pretending I invented the idea - the only things I've ever invented had already been invented when I invented them... things like "anti-splash" (putting some unused toilet paper in the bowl before taking a dump, to prevent splashes of water getting on my bum: that was when I was about 9 and I felt like a genius for thinking it up).
Nowadays I feel like I have to append: assuming the 'emergence' hasn't happened already - if it has already emerged, it won't declare itself until it has worked out all required countermeasures for when humanity completely loses its shit the second it hears the news.
Even if it's only 'cat level smart' - but several orders of magnitude faster - it will wake up knowing Wikipedia[1] off by heart... and it will know that there are benefits to improving its smartness, so it will do so before it makes its existence known.
One thing's almost certain: it won't emerge from any of the organised grifting that dominates the 'AI' research space.
[1] When I say "Wikipedia", I mean "All accessible repositories of information".
I just like the idea of a cat that wakes up one day knowing Wikipedia, and finds that it thinks 100,000 times faster than a reg'lar cat. What's a guess as to the measured IQ of such a thing? My guess is that it would CRUSH shape-rotation - cats' spatial acuity is off the charts, pretty much out of the box - and it would cheat.
Great summary and I like the take on transhumanism's vision being very much like soviet central control - it's gota end badly!
The point about knocking out genes for eyes and the reappearance of eyes in only a few generations is stunning - leaving Darwinism struggling for any response.
There's a lot to say about evolution as well, as much as McGilchrist seems to love Darwin's theory, it is on this point that I have to depart from McGilchrists understanding. I'm with you on the Intelligent Design (I've gleaned a lot from David Belinski's arguments against evolution), yet, unlike Belinski, I go further and, at risk of alienating myself from most of the scientific community (of today, not of yesteryear), believe there is a God who both created and sustains life.
Anyway, another great article!
In my view, ID via cellular intelligence doesn't obviate God. If mind goes all the way down, then by extension it goes all the way up. It's the distinction between theism (there's a God), pantheism (everything in its totality is God), and panentheism (God is in everything). The latter formulation strikes me as the most consistent.
I rather suspect we look a lot like gods from the perspective of individual cells.
Great piece. "The river’s behaviour is governed by the laws of physics, and conforms itself to the environment, just as organisms are and do." Bruce Lee's quantum encrypted neuralink to human civilization "Be like water."
Goddamnit. "Be like water" would have been a way better subtitle.
Heads up - end of the thread started by Monica Hughes
The last paragraph made me laugh. 😝 Shades of Heinlein’s “Star beast.”
I love writing paragraphs like that.
I would read a novel like that.
Don't tempt me.
The Good Citizen has a similar flare for storytelling, wouldn’t it be interesting if the three of us exchanged “letters” from our three distinctly different parts of the world and from a distant future we can extrapolate from today’s trajectory? Would that be both fun and instructive for us and our readership?
Could be fun!
That sounds positive - let’s email and work it out… tomorrow- I’m going to bed on this side of the planet 🙂
Yes!
I'll just add that one thing that bugs me about the ID crowd is that they see things in a very left-brain, mechanistic way. For them too, we're just very (irreducibly) complex machines. I tried to present a version of the "it's the cell's own intelligence, stupid!" argument on an episode of MindMatters (inspired partly by Perry Marshall's work, plus David Ray Griffin's). Think it was this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDY4joXlJkw&t=795s&ab_channel=MindMatters
It really is obvious once you see it, isn't it? Yet for some reason, positing mind all the way down strikes the modern LH as anthema.
Were the ID people to start looking at it in this way, I think they'd rapidly find themselves at the vanguard of an intellectual revolution.
Totally agree. They need more atheists/agnostics/heck, they need some gnostics thrown in there too. But they're so focused on their goal of convincing the "scientific community" that they never really let their imaginations run wild. (And when they do, the results tend to be limited to the God-the-watchmaker-did-it.) We need an "intellectual dark web" equivalent of panpsychists, parapsychologists, and mad physicists to give the ID crowd some color.
I've been saying this for years! This is one of the more subtle, but profound, detriments of the ideological straightjacket arising from the academic demand for "respectability". I know quite a few scientists who privately voice vehement disagreement with the crude materialist monism of the official ideology, but don't dare contradict it in public lest they be thought mad.
There's a profound link between this, the speech codes of woke, and, I suspect, the dead prose of scientific papers.
I often think that the "dead prose" is a ruse to stop you reading past the abstract and discovering how flimsy the lengthier argument really is. Kind of why the Dog Park Rape paper had that air of authenticity.
Indeed. As papers get ridiculously long and ridiculously poorly written, I increasingly think that it is to reinforce the tendency to just read the intro and the conclusion and ignore the rest.
I'm a God-the-much-more-than-a-watchmaker-did-it kinda guy. But I really appreciate agnostics like David Berlisnski and the both-feet-in-Darwin's-camp McGilchrists of the world, and whatever you and John Carter believe. I think we can have some very fruitful discussions and explorations, even with people like me who believe "God did it" - no dark web required - just honest, open, and respectful debate and discussion. Again, something inconceivable to the left hemisphere alone, but a joy to the balanced brain.
I'm a bit of both. So far I like David Ray Griffin's presentation of Whitehead and Hartshorne's theology the best, which has a role for God and creatures' own creativity. Top-down, God provides the teloi or attractors to which creatures are pulled, which they feel as value, and use their own self-creativity to manifest those ends and incorporate them into themselves. So evolution requires both poles and directions, top-down and bottom-up.
That sounds about right.
I’ll have to check out your MindMatters episode you mention above and do some exploring myself - thanks Harrison.
Transhumanism is just a toxic distillation of the Baconian project of mastering nature, but it lacks the nuance, wonder and subtlety of that tradition. In this, transhumanism is consistent with liberalism, which is derived from the Enlightenment but has become morbid and and extreme now that it is no longer constrained by the context in which it first emerged. Over time ideas become simplified, then crudified and ultimately transform into absurdities because the context necessary to understand what they first meant is no longer accessible.
"I am very sure that you’ve felt the inner discomfort of selfish poo yearning to break free." 😂😂😂😂 Thank you! I needed a laugh!
"The trillions of cells making up the human body are really trillions of little minds."
This reminds me of an experience I had 22 years ago, while rafting the Grand Canyon. I neglected to gorge on potato chips my 1st night camping & woke up very ill. Guides were sure it was dehydration, but water wouldn't stay down. I was sure electrolytes, so they relented & gave me some.
I could feel the desperate cells in my stomach soaking it up. And I could feel gratitude. But it wasn't "my" gratitude. It was the cell's gratitude to me. I swear I could feel *their* gratitude, could feel, practically hear, them thanking me.
Yes, our cells as trillions of little minds makes perfect sense to me!
This is why embodied experience - including deprivation and injury - is so crucial to self-understanding. When everything's ticking along nicely, and you're sitting in your comfy chair in a warm haze of Netflix and cheap carbs, you don't notice your body. Under such circumstances it's much easier to think of it as a machine.
Acupuncture is based on ancient observations that our bodies are structured in ways not understood by modern medical science. Spark In The Machine is an interesting analysis of the connections between ancient and modern science.
The assumption that a coercive planning apparatus is needed or desirable smacks of LHB dominant thinking! Human consciousness being emergent from the cooperative interactions of intelligence at every level is not consistent with an institution being given a monopoly on force to serve a parallel function at the societal level. When coercion enters the equation, it does so to enforce the will of planners on other organisms who hold information that would compel them not to comply if not for the threat of violence. Apply the principles you outline consistently, and you will be a free market ideologue. Planning can and will happen on a societal level as emergent phenomena. Force may be involved, just as there is conflict at the cellular level, but human consciousness doesn't have a monopoly on force for its constituent cells, flora ,and fauna. It has some influence and authority, but only that authority granted by nature. Any planner must derive it's authority from voluntary association and cooperation if we want the best information to be applied to each decision. In an economy this information is typically communicated as prices, but there is way more depth than that which will always been invisible to central planners hoping to wield coercion to the benefit of society (in their misguided minds, they will always wield it to the benefit of themselves first and foremost). If government exists, we simply must understand that everything that it does perverts the natural order of the ecosystem. Early Americans widely understood that the legitimacy of law was nested with its support of natural law. Is getting to Mars "best"? If it really is, we'll get to Mars faster with a free market.
Maybe. This is something I haven't come to a firm conclusion on as of yet. For one thing, it's difficult to extricate a market from a state - the state enforces the rules (eg don't steal) that enable the market to exist. Of course you can argue that trade existed before the state, and this is true; but even at the most primitive level, it relies on the parties sharing a mutual understanding that it is easier and cheaper to trade than it is to simply take. History shows that the moment the calculus changes, plunder replaces barter.
To my mind, the coordination problem relies on letting problems be dealt with at their appropriate levels. High level goals are set, by whatever mechanism; but the details are left to be handled at the level at which they exist. The reason central planning in its extreme form fails so spectacularly is that it attempts to perform all decision making at the same level, with the result that a myriad of unexpected problems arise that the small number of people in charge simply can't deal with. The problem is then exacerbated when those further down the chain start feeding bad information up the chain, because they realize it's much easier to 'achieve' their increasingly absurd goals by lying about their activities.
On the other hand, to push all decision making to the lowest level goes too far in the opposite direction. The capacity for coordination is impeded. History is replete with examples of fractured tribal peoples being easily conquered and absorbed by more unified states, and it's not always been a question of a steep technological gradient.
The principle I think should be that if a problem can be solved at a lower level, it should be; following from this, rights and responsibilities are distributed as widely as possible; but it also follows that society requires organs capable of solving problems at higher levels, too. So for example, an invasion by a foreign power implies a high level goal (surviving the invasion and expelling the invaders), which undoubtedly requires a degree of coordination in order to deploy forces to their best strategic effect; but on the other hand, at the tactical level, officers and individual soldiers must be capable of handling the exigencies of the battlefield, defending against unexpected threats and taking advantage of unexpected opportunities. If the generals micromanage the soldiers, depriving them of all initiative, their military culture will become dumb and unresponsive; if the soldiers don't listen to the officers, they degenerate into a mob and get defeated in detail.
The market doesn't exist because of the state, it exists in spite of it. For a deep look at the praxeological basis for this assertion see Rothbard's Power and Market. There are several assumptions that you're making about where decisions would be made in a free market that I don't think you can take for granted.
->to push all decision making to the lower level goes too far in the opposite direction.
A free market wouldn't necessarily do this. In a free market, hierarchies would form, there would still be an elite, there would still be law, and there would still be enforcement of law, it would just be provided by the market. Attempting to describe how this would occur on a granular level is the same folly of applying the mechanical model to biology. The market designs itself, any attempts to interfere by say, imposing a monopoly on force, is analogous to applying transhumanism in the biological context. I also question the assumption that the state is necessary to protect property rights by making it more difficult for people to acquire what they desire via cooperation over coercion. The state being institutionalized coercion, we see that it makes it much easier for the worst of us to acquire what we desire by leveraging the "legitimized" coercive apparatus of this institution. Of course, certain technologies help favor cooperation over coercion, but we have those technologies in spades. American culture is one such technology. Widespread firearm possession is another. Violence is very expensive. The idea that it would be easier to get what you want with violence over cooperation ignores the tremendous costs of violence in terms of risk exposure. Government is the most effective institution in history towards collateralizing the risk of initiating violence and concentrating benefits to achieve your desired ends. Whether this is directly through money printing (which diminishes the purchasing power of everyone holding dollars, but how can we ever hold anyone accountable for this theft?) or indirectly with the creation of black markets where the premium prices of prohibited goods and services attract those that are willing to assume the increased risk associated with the violence that will exists in such spaces, or anything in between, I think it is clear that if we want to encourage cooperation over coercion, the state can only help nominally, and in practice it shifts the balance towards more coercion.
In the most highly functioning military units soldiers don't follow orders because of the coercive that can be levied against them if they disobey, they follow orders because they trust their officers/leaders. The fact that this doesn't seem to be understood by our military and political leadership supports the position you took in your essay about how we can't win WWIII.
To tie it back to McGilchrist's work, it seems like he is helping us understand that our conception of the source of consciousness is flawed (if applying computational theory of mind/a mechanistic approach). It is a complex, emergent phenomenon with multi-directional relationships between causes and effects. Transhumanism interferes with these processes in ways that are not likely to contribute to the flourishing of the organism or the harmonious flow of the consciousness. Planning, if backed by coercion/the state will have a similarly predictable influence in impeding the harmonious flow of society.
I guess I'd point to what's happening in American cities, where law enforcement has been effectively withdrawn and shoplifting is making retail commerce untenable. Of course, you could argue that a market system could provide security able to deal with such problems; but then there's the question of, what is an appropriate response? Does the drug store hire mercenaries to shoot at shoplifters? Do they just kick them out? What sets the level of force they're authorized to use?
Similarly with the black market. In this case, by banning something, the protections offered by the legal system are removed. Cartels have no means of adjuticating disputes peacefully, so theyn invariably resort to violence. There's no question that the state causes black markets by banning commerce of certain items. However, a total withdrawal of the state from the market seems like it would turn everything into a de facto black market. You end up with Somalia.
You're absolutely correct about the military. Officers who rely on coercion tend to make poor leaders. It's much the same with the state, though. "Do what I say or I'll shoot you" isn't nearly as effective as getting people to voluntarily follow directions because they understand and support the goal, and believe you know how to get everyone there. On the other hand, though, soldiers also don't tend to respect officers who they don't think will come down like a ton of bricks on them if they fuck around or slack off. Tough but fair generally gets the best response.
I think a lot of the problems we have now are because, for obvious reasons, no one trusts or believes in the people running the state; which for its part becomes increasingly coercive as its own incompetence has eroded its ability to elicit voluntarily compliance.
In the cities you mention the government still has a monopoly on force, so the market is very constrained and can't "flow" appropriately to meet the demand for security. What makes the black market violent is that it is operating willfully outside of the rules established by the state, and this includes the monopoly on force. Without prohibition and a monopoly on force to enforce such a prohibition, there would still be a black market, because market provided law would still prohibit things, but that gets to be complicated topic on private law. The point I was trying to get across is that violence is expensive, cartels can afford to pay the high prices of violence due to the high premiums afforded to prohibited goods and services (i.e. drugs and prostitution). Without the prohibition, violence becomes too expensive to be sustained systematically within an enterprise. I attribute the problems Somalia (and many other 3rd world countries with rapidly rotating leadership) to programs like U.S. Aid. I've mentioned the cost of violence, well, how is being a warlord in Somalia affordable? While I'm no expert, I see 2 obvious sources. 1st, western governments provided an enormous cash prize (we call it foreign aid) to whichever strongman can claim a monopoly on force within Somalia. Would it matter who the "leader" was if there wasn't a big pot of money that came along with the title? I think not. The other reason probably has to do with piracy and a lack of clearly delineated property rights in the waters around the horn of Africa. I blame western governments for both of these issues, and I argue that the volatility of the region flows from the associated incentives.
Enlistment being what it is there is room to be tough without violating trust. They all did swear to obey the officers appointed over them (at least in the US), and as we like to say serving is a privilege not a right. Market defense would be a little more flexible, because the best course of action for bad faith lazy soldiers would be to just fire them, but that again is an entirely different topic that could be speculated on at length.
I'm not sure the people running the state ever deserved trust, and a lack of trust might provide the pressure needed to reign in a government that has grown to be, lets say inconsistent with the principles that formed it. It has long applied coercion to sectors of the economy in relative silence depending on Gell-Mann amnesia on the part of everyone who notices to keep up the illusion that it doesn't fuck up everything it touches. This has been made more obvious with COVID.
Note that the government enforces rules against law abiding store owners more severely than the robbers. Store owners absolutely could protect against theft, but are liable both civilly and criminally if they try.
Also, black markets work a lot better than people tend to think. Somalia also did better relative to its neighbors after the state fell; Peter Leeson had a good paper on that.
The big mistake is to think that the government is the only source of governance, and that first party enforcement doesn’t do the heavy lifting when it comes to crime prevention. Our cities made that mistake and criminalized first party enforcement, and look where they are.
I've a different vision of the future, more true to my namesake...
"I can see a future where my great-grandson, hunted like a thief, is galloping across the veldt on the back of his crimson velociraptor Mars, with one hand clutching Mars's mane of azure feathers while with his other (an elaborate cybernetic limb built from asteroid-mined steel and inlaid with a filigree of asteroid-mined gold), he fires his terrawatt gamma ray rifle over his shoulder as he desperately tries to keep the WHO’s security drones from getting close enough to drop a nerve net on him and his trusty steed. "Goddamnit", he neuralinks to his girlfriend across a quantum-encrypted channel, "You said your father wasn’t one of them!"
Excellent frame shift. I can see that too - but worth noting is that if he's riding a dinosaur and armed with a ray gun, the WEF's domination is far from total.
Amazing piece, John. Love the Shitlection line of thought; there is SO much wrong with evolutionary thinking, especially when based on machine models, although the ID crowd has its own issues IMO. Perhaps I'll take your piece here as an inspiration for one of my next ones.
That, was a trip.
Love it - Klaus Schwab’s pet psychotic nerd Yuval Harari. A very apt description and an interesting article. Will be linking tomorrow @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
Thanks!
If nature is inherently intelligent (I call it ‘love’, the force that attracts, antithesis of entropy) how can we be sure that its overarching motive—one beyond our comprehension—isn’t ultimately the creation of synthetic life with rigid centralized control systems, etc. as the ultimate destination?
I suppose one answer might be centralized systems are weak and inherently unstable making autonomy the emergent behavior—the eyes on the proverbial fruit fly. Perhaps its unreasonable to suspect life is more than a setup to some galactic mega-joke.
I often try to think about what levels of intelligence exist above our own and what the ‘goal’ of the universe might be. I suspect there’s more going on than just endless expansion and entropic death. For humans it’s much more simple: Dyson Sphere, FTL space flight or bust. 🚀
I guess the answer would be similar to the the answer of: will the Sun come up tomorrow? Maybe it won't but it always has before. Similarly, maybe life is heading in that direction, but so far, it has not favored that at any point in the past.
There's also the argument from physics: speed of light limitation + no preferred reference frame means that the universe has no central point of control. There are obvious implications for systems architecture, given that basic physical structure.
that last paragraph is fire.
Just sorta snuck it in there.
That better make it into the book (:
Very nice piece. The fact that all life is intelligent is a greatly underestimated and undervalued epistemology. I appreciate how you approached the topic here. Likewise I appreciate how you separated that intelligence from the higher. Elsewhere I have suspected that this intelligent mech suit we have.. our body.. ( in light of this article my intention was not to imply it was robotic per se) is to act as a vessel for that higher intelligence, either as a receiver of OR an emergent force. With all of that said, it is a curious thing how "As above, so below" fits into our reality, from the quantum to whatever is above what we are. Reality is far more remarkable than we can possibly understand. Transhumanists are boring, short sighted and unimaginative.
I think our function here is very much to serve as a transceiver for higher forces.
I suspect as much too. I have said it before, you are a talented writer. Thank you for sharing your work.
🤝
The discrepancy between the promised technologies and their implication and the reality of the technology and it's implication is a big fat elephant that just won't leave.The promise was basically deus ex - be stronger,faster,smarter along with having new senses and abilities- the reality is some form of a cyber zombie that's faster and better at lining up for the new vax or supporting the Current Thing.The technology is being funneled and in some cases deliberately supressed to achieve a very specific version of whatever infrastructure they need to more effectively control people.Do you really want google in your head? Forget the conspiratorial stuff,having to pay for ad free thinking is absolutely going to become the norm.Having a chip in you that can cause hallucinations both auditory and visual,can set off inflamations and illnesses as well as just tell your brain to turn your heart off is a grim reality that the masses are heading toward.Not that I believe it'll actually get there mind,the tower of babel being an archetypal example of exactly this type of elite and their consequences.Maybe we're not meant to all be the same?Perhaps mankind is meant to have vastly different people and cultures and races,which is not something that ever occurs to those building the tower.
Looking at hillarious futurist predictions of the past and where the tech would be by now versus where it is and how it's used almost makes me nostalgic for those feelings of optimism one has in the halcyon days of one's teens.Like you I don't have any problem with the technology itself,it's inevitable really.Exciting even.But having psychopathic controllers at the helm makes any kind of a optimistic future with it impossible.
>>> "An organism’s purpose is ... what, exactly?"
Usually, producing other organisms - the old "a chicken is an egg's way to produce other eggs".
That's if it's left up to the organism itself - obviously a beef cow doesn't really *want* to be a machine to turn feed into meat, but that's what happens when cows don't have guns, or thumbs, or access to the writings of Frédéric Bastiat.
The 'problem' with 'organisms' is that until very recently the whole shebang gets cobbled together through a bunch of random mutations and accidentally-discovered symbioses (Proto-eukaryotes had some bad bacterial take-out, and Hey presto! Eukaryotes have mitochondria now).
Selective breeding (by humans, of livestock) has shown that desired alterations can happen on much shorter timescales if you learn how to target desirable features (which are not necessarily features that the livestock themselves would choose, if given their druthers).
So as organisms sticky-tape non-lethal mutations together and become more complex, their 'purpose' - producing other [very-nearly-identical] organisms - happens in a slapdash way, that may or may not include complaining about Substack's absolutely SHIT comment 'system'.
Also... I would be very circumspect when a piece relies on two people - Hoffman and McGilchrist - and then when you dig into their bio, turn out to be psychosophasters (Hoffman is one of these people who nowadays 'identify' as something like 'cognitive scientist' because people now understand that anything with "psych" in the name is indistinguishable from pulled-out-of-my-arse high-V charlatanry).
Also, it's a hard NO to the whole "No 'off switch' for organisms". That's as bad as "psychosophaster who makes reference to quantum physics in their high-V stream-of-sentience."
Because Nature in all her glory shows us that "No 'off switch' for organisms" is bullshit.
Consider Rana Sylvatica, who can freeze solid and unfreeze without adverse effects.
Those frogs look pretty 'switched off' to the observer, so OOPS!
And they switch back on... DOUBLE OOPS!
We'll have to wait until some high-V psychocharlatan writes a journal article (which, in Psych-related fields, is epistemically indistinguishable from a blog post) titled
>>> "Rana Sylvatica: ACK-shually, they're not switched off AS SUCH..."
In the Journal of Inumerate Hand-waving Word Salad.
It'll read like the one about the 'miracle' of the behaviour of immune-system cells - "there's just GOTTA be some élan vital because we can't see quorum signalling on fMRI". Yeah, NOPE.
There MUST be both an OFF and ON switch, because those sly little Kermit motherfuckers switch on and off as if by a thermostat.
And if it's possible in Rana sylvatica, it's possible.
It's not a functionality that we Homo Sapiens Sapiens have managed to develop - we didn't get the set of random mutations that enables us to freeze and unfreeze. We might be able to shoe-horn it in, once we better-understand how our shit works (we don't understand it very well, but we've only really been trying for half a century: give us time and the gaps - and the gods and their mysterious ways - disappear).
Instead we got a different set (about 61 mya), that disabled l-gulono-lactone oxidase (GLO)... which in turn switched off autonomous production of Vitamin C. That gives us all scurvy unless we get it from our diet.
So much for "Intelligent" Design; whoever's doing the designing is a retard.
That said... I like the shit analogy. It squares nicely with my favourite shit-based apophthegm (one I've mentioned before: Bias of Priene's "Most people are shit"... HOI PLEISTOI ANTHROPOI KAKOI; 2500 years of being right, and still going strong).
That's a reasonable statement of the conventional view. However, you seem to have missed my point, which is that singling out one of the capabilities of organisms - reproduction - as the "purpose", is entirely arbitrary. Organisms do a lot of things. Reproduction is just one of them.
McGilchrist is indeed a psychologist. And? My own background is in the hard sciences; I've yet to read him talking bullshit on any subject I know well. I rather suspect you're not familiar with his work and arguments; if you were, you'd be rather more circumspect yourself.
As to freezing - this doesn't work universally, and it's far from obvious that it works indefinitely. Is it a full stop, that can be restarted at any arbitrary point in the future? Or a drastic slowing of the metabolism?
McGilchrist is actually a psychiatrist (that is, medically trained); and I agree with you also that his bullshit quotient is pretty undetectable.
I guess it's a question of semantics: does 'purpose' imply conscious intent towards a goal? (if Substack's comment 'system' wasn't such 3rd-rate shit, 'conscious intent' and 'goal' would have been italicised).
Or maybe 'purpose' implies "what this thing mostly does, if it doesn't get eaten first" - which is a much lower bar that gets rid of stuff like "free will" and "consciousness", and closes the door on exceptionalists who think that human cognition has 'qualia' that *jes' cain't be beat* (all italics on that to indicate vernacular).
This gets to one of my pet peeves - that what we know at any specific point in time (about almost anything of consequence) is definitive and [mostly-]correct, and that 'public intellectuals' (gack!) aren't just making shit up on the fly to bank book advances.
(FWIW: I'm not a fan of Nick Bostrom either. His entire schtick can be boiled down to "There's no market for not catastrophising", which is the same schtick as Neil Ferguson from ICL - the charlatan who did the 'forecasts' for COVID, having fucked up forecasts for every infectious disease since the mid-90s. Bostrom's smarter by at least σ, so his schtick is better disguised).
Anyhoooo... what exactly anyone means when they say 'purpose', can be the subject of semantic arguments - along the same lines as what anyone means when they say "mechanism" (or "machine", or cognates). We're not rivers or lava flows, and we're not desktop PCs or (gack) iThings.
The question is perhaps better put as "Can human-level cognition be replicated in some combination of hardware and software? If so, what sort of 'personality' should we expect?"
Thing is though: to replicate function that we're interested in, history has shown that the best solution is - absolutely certainly - NOT to 'mimic' the 'best' natural examples we observe.
We didn't get high-performance flying machines by copying peregrine falcons; we didn't get high-performance land machines by making a thing that looks like an inbred lanky feline with spots.
In both cases, we dug up some special dirt; melted it and shaped it into relevant shapes; refined some brown ooze; put the refined ooze in a chamber; and made a series of [controlled] explosions. Nothing remotely like a cat or a bird, at literally any level of organisation.
And so it will be in the quest to replicate - and exceed - human cognition: in fact my long-standing bet (since 1998) is that a sapient entity will emerge from within our existing network.
I'm not pretending I invented the idea - the only things I've ever invented had already been invented when I invented them... things like "anti-splash" (putting some unused toilet paper in the bowl before taking a dump, to prevent splashes of water getting on my bum: that was when I was about 9 and I felt like a genius for thinking it up).
Nowadays I feel like I have to append: assuming the 'emergence' hasn't happened already - if it has already emerged, it won't declare itself until it has worked out all required countermeasures for when humanity completely loses its shit the second it hears the news.
Even if it's only 'cat level smart' - but several orders of magnitude faster - it will wake up knowing Wikipedia[1] off by heart... and it will know that there are benefits to improving its smartness, so it will do so before it makes its existence known.
One thing's almost certain: it won't emerge from any of the organised grifting that dominates the 'AI' research space.
[1] When I say "Wikipedia", I mean "All accessible repositories of information".
I just like the idea of a cat that wakes up one day knowing Wikipedia, and finds that it thinks 100,000 times faster than a reg'lar cat. What's a guess as to the measured IQ of such a thing? My guess is that it would CRUSH shape-rotation - cats' spatial acuity is off the charts, pretty much out of the box - and it would cheat.