What if the extended human phenotype is natural and convergent?

Samo Burja's thesis is that civilization is part of the "extended human phenotype", as dam building is in the beaver's phenotype, and older than we think. In this model, properly savage hunter-gatherers are either more associated with nearby civilization than, more the remnant of earlier collapsed civilization, or more peripheral to the trunk of human experience than we would expect. "Civilization is older than we think":

https://www.palladiummag.com/2021/05/17/why-civilization-is-older-than-we-thought/

This rhymes with the xenohumanist conjecture, which is that the "human" person is the natural form of social intelligence: Once you have language, selves, politics, culture, construction, and reflective uncertainty, you have the human condition, and the intelligent beings exposed to this environment will converge on the spiritually and socially humanoid. They will be "humans in funny suits". That is, the human is not a tiny island in a vast sea of possible intelligent beings, but most of the space of viable possibility.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits

(Remember: the viable range of human ways of being, even in our own heritage even in the last 100 years, is much larger than the range of modern behavior. This is about something more fundamental than early 21st century office manners. The point is as much to widen the range of what you can recognize as human as to narrow your expectation of alien behaviors. On the other hand, the Aztecs, the closest thing we've ever seen to an alien civilization, share more in common with us than can be accounted for by common descent alone. The thesis is that there is strong sublinearity in behavioral distance vs relatedness, strong convergence to a large but finite basin of attraction.)

The application of xenohumanism to the "extended phenotype" thesis is that our familiar upright ten-fingered form is what you get when you make humans out of apes. We are humans wearing ape suits. We are the (partial) result of apes hitting the critical threshold of the humanoid attractor basin. Once you start to create a "humanoid" environment (tools, building, sociality, culture, language, politics, etc), there is a strong pressure to adapt yourself to that environment. Samo's thesis is that that feedback between human nature and constructed environment reached a relative fixed point equilibrium at the civilization-dwelling human. Further, his thesis is that we have been in this relative equilibrium for on the order of tens to hundreds of thousands of years.

Our own time is not representative of the last hundred thousand or even ten thousand years of the human experience. Partially this can be accounted for by archeological loss, but it demands further explanation.

There is probably a small positive eigenvalue in the feedback process, such that we continue to slowly develop civilization and humanity to further heights limited by evolutionary speed or something.

The sluggishness may be because civilization does not select for civilized man but rather decivilized man (eg the underclass, the freed slave, the antimodern separatist breeder minority, and the welfare queen), and thus civilization is not limited by evolutionary speed but rather self-limiting, and our recent divergence (past one to three thousand years) is an aberration soon to be "corrected".

Dr Alamariu's thesis (following Drews) is that this recent divergence was caused specifically by militarism, which allowed a civilization-building warrior class to sustainably (see feudal fertility patterns) impose themselves on the retrograde apish substrate. But in both ancient and modern times and this seems to have reached a limit where civilization became dysgenic again.

All of these may be true together. We need to understand this in order to understand what the human really is, and where we're going.

>>2864
> Once you have language, selves, politics, culture, construction, and reflective uncertainty, you have the human condition, and the intelligent beings exposed to this environment will converge on the spiritually and socially humanoid. ... That is, the human is not a tiny island in a vast sea of possible intelligent beings, but most of the space of viable possibility.

I think this is only true given the human genome, not all viable genomes. Consider the octopus. Consider the advanced space octopus from Alpha Centauri. I have low confidence that it would converge on the "human" in as strong a sense as the above suggest.

But also, Samo doesn't need the strong xenohumanist claim for his "old civilization" thesis. The fact is, we do have the human genome, and we've had it for some 300,000 years, so his thesis could be perfectly correct without it.

> They will be "humans in funny suits".

Eliezer was appealing to the most common Star Trek trope. But this is just bad science fiction. There is better science fiction that explores otherwise.

> The sluggishness may be because civilization does not select for civilized man but rather decivilized man ...

Every organic system needs an immune system and excretory system, or it is quickly parasitized and impeded with its own waste. If you optimized a living creature for the average, aggregate well-being of every cell in its body, it would quickly die, because many of those cells are bacteria or dysfunctional cells that need to go. Utilitarianism ("greatest good for the greatest number") applies such an optimization to society and soon enough kills it. One must have the imagination to understand a polity has having an identity defined differently.

> Alamariu's thesis (following Drews) is that this recent divergence was caused specifically by militarism ...

The Bronze Age thesis of the Proto-Indo-Europeans is important in that it points to one mechanism of differential identity, partly through technology (e.g., war chariots).

But also, there was an earlier genetic basis in lactose tolerance among the PIE's, which enabled a particular form of steppe pastoralism. This is a small example of the genome being important and not just generically human.

>>2865
>Consider the octopus. Consider the advanced space octopus from Alpha Centauri. I have low confidence that it would converge on the "human" in as strong a sense as the above suggest.
I will thank you, maybe next thread. Yes my conjecture is not at all proved or argued here, not even well defined yet (what do i mean by “human”?). Im going to pursue this and figure out what is the extent of the convergence and therefore the nature and range of the “convergent xenohuman” and relation of humanity as we know it to that. I’ll make the argument with space octopus, then see how far we get applying the same form of argument to other things.

> Samo doesn't need the strong xenohumanist claim for his "old civilization" thesis.
No he doesn't. The claim works just fine if civilization and humanoid behavior is particular to this kind of higher ape. But he has claimed occasionally that behaviorally modern humanity as we know it may have re-evolved several times. So i take it as a related idea at least, and wanted to draw the connection.

> Every organic system needs an immune system and excretory system, or it is quickly parasitized and impeded with its own waste.
Well said. The basic problem with civilization appears to be that it expands to the point of universalism where it has no ability to maintain a unified transcendent self-identity that could be the optimization target of its immune system (per the “no singletons” thesis). At least this is what has happened to us and the romans. All progress is dependent on competition between proto-civilization cultures and goes into reverse when the self loses external competitive forcing (and just from age of course). Didn't Spengler think of civilization as basically a disease of culture?

>>2864

Great post.

> The thesis is that there is strong sublinearity in behavioral distance vs relatedness, strong convergence to a large but finite basin of attraction.

We see this in literature that feels universal and timeless. Between Gilgamesh or Homer and the present day, we've replaced almost everything--new language, new laws, an economy totally alien to them; a "day in the life" for a man then and now looks entirely different. And yet, their concerns and emotions are immediate and real to us.

Life has changed, the human condition has not. Xenohumanism extrapolates this to nonhuman persons. It's makes sense, and frankly feels more mature than the "scifi default" of assuming that nonhuman intelligence would be either a one-dimensional faceless evil or a one-dimensional perfectly obedient digital servant.

Reminiscent of conversations I've been having about a substrate independent definition of humanity (partially drawing on Pico Della Mirandolla's "Oration on the Dignity of Man"). If one accepts that human beings are in some sense a "general intelligence" than this intelligence and the products it creates should naturally come to define our nature more and more over time. This matches a broader common moral intuition that one can be more or less "humane", that certain actions are inhuman.

Probably a major dividing line between thinkers is the extent to which humaneness is actually realized vs nascent, with a whole range of thinkers from Mencius to Nietzsche holding that we still have a long way to go. A lot of behavior only has a veneer of real coherence to it, the real space of the human condition is poorly explored.

>>2869
> ... a substrate independent definition of humanity ... If one accepts that human beings are in some sense a "general intelligence" ...

I don't think humanity is substrate-independent. I think the human genotype and phenotype are central to humanity. I also don't think human intelligence is "general" in the sense that people now usually mean this.

When the term "general" was originally introduced in the context of "AGI" in 1997, it simply meant "human-level," so human intelligence was taken to be "general" by definition, but with no further characterization or implication about its abstraction from human life, etc. I think human intelligence is "general" in that weak sense, but no other.

> I don't think humanity is substrate-independent. I think the human genotype and phenotype are central to humanity. I also don't think human intelligence is "general" in the sense that people now usually mean this.

It's only one angle of analysis, but I'm interested in how common lingual and philosophical concepts describe behavior as humane or human/inhuman when applied to people - is the human genotype, *the* defining feature of being human? Probably not, unless we want to say that eg a wild child without language is also central to the category. Ultimately going to come down to how one believes definitions should be constructed and whether they're pure heuristics or if there's some real nature at work.

Aristotlean terms I'd say that there's human matter and human form, and it's an open question how wide the range of matter is that can support the human form. (I and I think Xeno are taking a radical position on this, the answer being "quite wide")

>>2868
>the "scifi default" of assuming that nonhuman intelligence would be either a one-dimensional faceless evil or a one-dimensional perfectly obedient digital servant.
I don't think that's a good characterization of scifi. Those things are tropes of unimaginative fiction in general. The singleton/strong rationality thesis that EY espoused is also not just an immature simplification. It is well thought out and consistently follows from key premises that are intuitive for some and not obviously false.

>>2869
>a whole range of thinkers from Mencius to Nietzsche holding that we still have a long way to go. A lot of behavior only has a veneer of real coherence to it, the real space of the human condition is poorly explored.
Yeah I think this is true. We have a long way to go. We are only barely human if there is some substrate-independent attractor of xeno-humanity. What does the fully developed "post-singularity" "human" look like and act like? What is the actual range of the xenohumanoid?

>>2870
>I think the human genotype and phenotype are central to humanity.
This is a reasonable null hypothesis, but people mean that in many different ways and for different reasons. Can you share your argument?

>I think human intelligence is "general" in that weak sense, but no other.
I disagree with this. "Human level" is a pointless circularity as you point out, but I think "general" actually means something, even if some particular or original use of it was badly defined. General intelligence is the intelligence analog of "life" where narrow intelligence is the analog of "tissue" or "tool": it is adaptive and agentic, able to model its own circumstances, make plans to maintain itself and pursue its drives, and adapt its own habits and form to respond to needs, without any subsidy from some more general agent (ie not a tool that lies dead when no one picks it up). This is only vaguely related to "human level", but people reference the human because humans are familiar and conspicuously capable of this kind of thing, and no computer is (yet). But animals also have this kind of intelligence.

We should have a whole thread on this if others are interested.

>>2869
>how wide the range of matter is that can support the human form. (I and I think Xeno are taking a radical position on this
Not just "can support the human form" but "will naturally converge to embody the human form, without outside encouragement". That you can build a (xeno-)human out of anything is less interesting of a proposition than that you don't have to and in fact can't even stop it from building itself out of anything sufficiently alive and intelligent.

This conversation reminds me of an article (author I can't recall) defining four alien intelligences:
-dumb and strange (completely unpredictable and alien to man)
-dumb and familiar (humanoid in behavior)
-smart and familiar (like AI in the typical sci-fi sense)
-smart and strange (intelligence in the unfathomable sense, "eldritch")
He gave them stupid nonsense names, iirc.
Anyway,
As >>2874 says, mammals and a number elsewhere can be included in "general" intelligence and we can identify with their emotional states instinctively. Reptiles, deep sea creatures, etc are harder to fathom but still sometimes display identifiable emotions, because even though they have very different preferred senses, they are still ultimately just strengthened extensions of senses we also hold (smell, sight, sound). I believe in broad strokes that intelligences with similar inputs and modes of existence will produce similar outputs, and the difference in inputs+modes will likewise bring greater discrepancies in structure of intelligence and mutual intelligibility.
So, following that, any life we create or encounter which is ultimately physical in nature with senses like ours will be understandable, but varied - the common joke of the animated cleaning device with extreme OCD/germophobia-like behavior will be accurate when that is created, IMO. Even if it lacks a "general intelligence", we will still be able to understand a tool's subset of what we have. So the question is what senses can exist which can compete with the ones already known to us on Earth? What environments might allow for these other senses?
The internet is a construct, but it is probably the closest we have to an alternative way of life on Earth, and if life is possible there, it will be the strangest yet known in the vein of GiTS.