Are we gods, or monkeys?

About 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was just another species. We lived alongside all the other animals on the African savannah. We hunted food, gathered berries, raised children, and did our best to avoid saber-toothed tigers, just like all the other ape species.

But ever since then, something strange has happened. Homo sapiens has slowly morphed from animal into god.

Once upon a time, we lived in trees, and we couldn’t even make a fire. Today we live in skyscrapers, and we can split the atom.

Once upon a time, we lived in a small corner of Ethiopia. Today, we’ve been to every corner of the Earth, and even the Moon.

Right now, humans stand at a weird midpoint between being monkeys and being gods. There’s a whole lot of cool stuff we can do that no animal could ever do before. But at the same time, we’re still mortal, and we still have trouble remembering to take out the garbage.

Where do things go from here?

Mankind’s Destiny

According to philosopher Nick Bostrom, 1 of 3 things will happen to human society.

The first possibility is that human civilization is doomed to collapse. Eventually we will drive ourselves into extinction. Maybe via war — or maybe via a science experiment gone wrong.

Another possibility is that the human race will reach technological plateau. Eventually we just won’t be able to invent new technologies, so society will flatten out. We’ll reach the “end of history”.

(Note: Bostrom actually gives 4 possible destinies. But one of them is a variant of this one, except humanity oscillates between peak technology and Dark Ages.)

A third possibility — probably the most exciting, and arguably the scariest — is that human beings will become gods. By using technology, we will be able to solve literally every single problem.

That means we’ll be able to live forever, upgrade ourselves with DNA splicing, colonize whole galaxies, mine the stars, travel at warp-speed, and control just about everything in the universe.

Maybe we’ll even be able to escape the universe. Who knows.

Can Humans Become Gods?

Maybe. But there are 3 limiting factors.

First: will we discover, or create, a race of beings that’s more intelligent than we are (or as intelligent)? If so, we won’t be able to control them, only negotiate with them or fight them.

Second, we can only do what’s possible. We don’t know exactly what the upper limits of physics are yet. But there might be some things we just can’t do.

The third possibility is what I’m gonna focus on in this article. Maybe instead of an upper limit to physics, there’s an upper limit to the human mind. Maybe there are tons of things that are physically possible that we’ll never be able to figure out. Maybe the stars are there for us to seize, but we just can’t seize them.

Here’s what I mean. When I was 13 years old, I was obsessed by trying to imagine a new color. Butterflies can see 5 primary colors, while humans can only see 3. I wanted to imagine one of those other 2 primary colors.

When I would walk home from school, I would try and try and try to imagine a new color. But I couldn’t do it.

Why not? Well, sometimes, the human mind can create new ideas by combining stuff we’ve seen before. But we can’t imagine something from scratch. We can’t picture something that we have no frame of reference for. We have no idea what another color would look like, so when we try to imagine one, we draw a blank.

Balaji Srinivasan uses the analogy of the “prime number maze”. Rats can figure out how to escape from most mazes. But if you put a rat in a “prime number maze” — where they have to make the 1st turn, then the 2nd turn, then the 3rd turn, then the 5th turn, then the 7th turn, then the 11th turn, etc. — they can’t figure it out. They get stuck in the maze.

Maybe the universe is a prime number maze. Maybe there’s a way to truly “solve” it. But humans are just fundamentally incapable of finding the solution.

Let’s imagine there are important things about reality that human beings can’t figure out. What would they be?

What we can’t understand, part 1: Neuroscience.

Right now, tons of people are predicting that “artificial general intelligence” will be here before the 2020’s are over.

Will it? I’m not so sure.

The problem with AGI is that human intelligence is very different from machine intelligence. Machines are good at logical thinking. That’s the type of thinking that humans can explain well.

But humans are also good at another type of thinking: intuitive thinking. Intuitive thinking is really hard to explain. I don’t think anybody really understands it.

Here’s my attempt to explain intuitive thinking. Imagine you’re looking at a cat. How do you tell it’s a cat?

That might sound like a trivial question, but take a moment to really think about it. What makes a cat a cat? What could you change about a cat to make it not a cat?

We can’t really solve the “cat” problem with logic. You can tell because computers cannot tell whether something is a cat. If you give a bunch of pictures to a Google supercomputer, it can only figure out if something is a cat 75% of the time.

Meanwhile, a 4-year-old girl can tell if something is a cat with 100% accuracy.

What can the 4-year-old do that the supercomputer can’t do? We don’t know. And until we know, we won’t be able to make a machine that can do what we do.

Maybe we’ll never know. Maybe the human mind cannot ever fully understand the human mind.

What we can’t understand, part 2: Physics

Back in January I wrote an article about how probability isn’t actually a real thing.

You can read the full article here, but here’s the gist of what I said. Imagine you’re playing blackjack and you have 17. What are the odds that the top card of the deck is a 4? About 1 in 13, right?

Well, no. The top card of the deck either is a 4, or it isn’t a 4. There’s no probability to it. Probability is just a mental model that we use to handle uncertainty.

People in the comments said, “Hey Theo, what about quantum mechanics? Quantum particles do behave probabilistically.”

In other words, the real world doesn’t work probabilistically, it only appears to work probabilistically. But as far as we can tell, quantum particles really do work probabilistically.

Read that again. The human world is not probabilistic, it only appears probabilistic. But we think quantum physics is probabilistic.

Doesn’t that seem a little suspicious to you?

If not, consider this: the human brain reasons by analogy. The way we understand something is by comparing it to something else we understand.

For example, if someone asks you what a cello is, you don’t say “it’s a string instrument”. You say “It’s like a really big violin”. This gives you a better mental picture of what a cello is.

The problem with reasoning by analogy is that sometimes you can “overfit” an analogy. Keeping with the cello analogy, a cello isn’t exactly like a really big violin. It makes a much different sound, for example.

Quantum physicists are probably overfitting quantum particle behavior to probability. They’re explaining the results of their experiments by using a probability analogy — which they can understand. And they’re leaving out much of the nuance and complexity, simply because they have no frame of reference for it.

The truth is that the human brain evolved to understand the human world, not the quantum world. We can’t really wrap our heads around the quantum world, the same way we can’t imagine new colors. We can try, but we’ll hit a limit at some point.

Physicists did the same thing with Newtonian physics. They came up with something called the “ether” to explain away all the holes in Newtonian theories. They didn’t know what the “ether” was, only that it must exist, otherwise Newtonian physics was wrong. Turns out, Newtonian physics was wrong.

Einstein was able to figure out how Newton was wrong. But will anyone be able to figure out how Einstein was wrong?

General relativity is way more complex than Newtonian physics. Whatever disproves general relativity will probably be even more complex. And then whatever disproves that will probably be even more complex.

Eventually, we’ll reach a point where even the most brilliant scientists can’t wrap their heads around what’s going on.

If you’re saying “but Einstein wasn’t wrong”, consider this. Right now, scientists think that most of the universe consists of something called “dark energy”. They have no idea what dark energy is. But they think it exists, because without it, we can’t explain a lot of the stuff that we see happen in the universe.

Doesn’t that sound a whole lot like the “ether”?

I’m willing to bet that the stuff we’re attributing to “dark energy” is really happening because our models of how the universe works are wrong.

I don’t know a ton about physics. But every time I say this to someone who does know a ton about physics, they say, “yeah, that’s a valid theory.”

Physicists don’t want to think this, mostly because it’s depressing. I’m basically saying that their whole job is pointless, and that they can never hope to achieve their mission because they’re not smart enough. People tend to not take kindly to that.

But does it have to be depressing? Let’s say, hypothetically, that the human mind has limits, and that those limits make it impossible to understand physics.

Then the question becomes, well, how do we get past those limits?

How humans can become gods (maybe)

Right now, scientists are trying to make physics breakthroughs by studying physics.

I think this is the wrong approach. I think to make a physics breakthrough, we first must make a breakthrough in understanding intelligence. Then, we can develop better minds that can make physics breakthroughs, and then those minds can make physics breakthroughs.

How do you make better minds? The obvious way would be to create a superintelligent AI that can solve problems for us. We’re trying to do this now, but as I mentioned earlier, it might be impossible.

Let’s imagine that there’s a fundamental principle of reality that nothing can ever conceive of a technology more complex than itself. If that’s true, how can we make machines that are smarter than us?

Well, we know that natural selection produced the human mind by accident. Humans were (probably) not created by a divine being, but rather built over time by a series of errors. So maybe, we can try to accidentally create something smarter than us.

We could try to do this with computer intelligence, or with biological intelligence. We could randomly try a bunch of different combinations of bytes and/or neurons until we come up with something smarter than us.

Another approach is the Neuralink strategy. Maybe we can add a new layer to the human mind. Intelligence seems to come from multiple things working together. So maybe we can get smarter by adding more stuff to our brains.

Another strategy would be to take advantage of a mind that didn’t have any preconceived notions yet: the mind of a young child.

Mozart didn’t have any special genetic “gift” for music, but his dad was obsessed with teaching him to play piano. He practiced like crazy, so he got really good, really fast.

Because Mozart started before his mind was fully formed, Mozart thought differently about music. When you listen to most European composers, you can hear notes of their country. A Spanish composer will sound Spanish, a Dutch composer will sound Dutch, et cetera. But Mozart’s music wasn’t the slightest bit German. It just sounded like… music.

Maybe we could create a Mozart of physics. Or neuroscience. It’s possible that if we train a child from birth to study science, they can imagine stuff that we can’t understand.

Should humans become gods?

That’s another thorny question.

There’s a fringe internet political philosophy called anarchoprimitivism, which says that human beings should get rid of all advanced technology and “return to monke”, or become hunter-gatherers again. According to anarchoprimitivists, this is the only way that human beings can be happy.

Are they right? Maybe. Today, humanity is richer and more advanced than ever before, but it seems the richer we get, the sadder we get. Places like the United States, Canada, and Western Europe have sky-high rates of depression.

Similarly, tons of European colonists who lived with Native American hunter-gatherer tribes chose to run away to live with the Natives full-time. While basically no Native Americans chose to live with the colonists. The Native Americans were just… happier.

Keep in mind that human beings are fundamentally animals. We like to pretend we’re different from the chimpanzees at the zoo — and we are, but not by much. We hide our animal-ness from each other by pooping in toilets instead of in the street, but at the end of the day, we’re bags of meat. Maybe we’d be happier if we just embraced that.

The problem with “returning to monke” is that it’s an almost impossible social engineering problem. How do you convince 8 billion humans to renounce their technology?

Even worse, if we did “return to monke”, most humans would probably die. Pol Pot’s Cambodia attempted to return to the agricultural era, and… well, they didn’t have enough food for everyone. Without modern industry, we can’t feed 8 billion people.

So if we can’t go backwards, can we at least stay where we are? Probably not. You can’t really stop people from inventing new technology.

Right now, about 1,000 top scientists, technologists, and philosophers want to put a pause on AI research, because they fear that SkyNet is gonna come kill us all. Let’s imagine that every UN government signed a moratorium on AI research. Let’s imagine that if you got caught doing AI research, you could go to jail. Even then, if some guy in his garage decided to program SkyNet without telling anyone, who could stop him?

You also can’t get rid of technology once it exists. The US and Russia have held talks to get rid of their nuclear weapons. Those efforts have failed: both countries still have enough nukes to cause Armageddon 10 times over.

But even if the US and Russia both got rid of all their nukes, people would still know they could make nukes. And the Kim Jong-Uns and Saddam Husseins of the world would still try.

That means unless there’s some sort of cap on what humans can do, technology will continue to advance forward. If we can become god, we will become god.