From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Wed Dec 31 2003 - 18:52:12 MST
William Calvin made a decent argument, in The Ascent of Mind, that human
brain size was limited during evolution by the size of the human female
vagina. In short, our heads couldn't be any bigger or they wouldn't fit out
the birth canal; and, there were good evolutionary reasons why it was hard
for the vaginal canal to get much wider.
I don't think there is a correlation between high IQ and psychological
problems. If there were, I guess it would likely be ascribable to
difficulties associated from being too far away from the mean of society in
any major dimension, rather than due to intrinsic problems associated with
intelligence.
-- Ben G
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-sl4@sl4.org [mailto:owner-sl4@sl4.org]On Behalf Of Randall
> Randall
> Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 8:45 PM
> To: sl4@sl4.org
> Subject: Re: An essay I just wrote on the Singularity.
>
>
>
> On Wednesday, December 31, 2003, at 07:45 PM, Tommy McCabe wrote:
>
> > As smart as we are? General intelligence only
> > developed a few hundred thousand years ago. Since when
> > is there any evidence that we can't get any smarter?
>
> Well, there is mild evidence. Anecdotally, at least,
> those with very high intelligence are prone to various
> other mental problems.
>
> While one can argue that the haphazard design of human
> brains makes them susceptible to errors at high complexity
> that generic intelligences need not exhibit, the reverse
> is also a possibility. That is, it might be that the
> structures required for anything we'd recognize as a
> person are necessarily limited in complexity.
>
> Anyway, I have a suspicion (not really well defined in
> my mind yet) that the universal failure of command
> economies is telling us something fundamental about
> complexity in our universe.
>
> --
> Randall Randall
> randall@randallsquared.com
>
>
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