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Comment by theboywho | Hacker News Reader

> it would be true for aliens that one can get better at something by practicing

We get better by practicing only because of our brain's neuroplasticity, which one might argue, is a mechanism of adaptation, and thus a result of evolution. An intelligent life might have developed other ways of coping with change, and not necessarily through a neuroplastic brain, but for example, through an instant rewiring of the brain that doesn't require any practice.

The same can be said for justice, even though it might seem as a social construct, it's still rooted in our biology (emotions are still "physical" reactions in our body) and so an intelligent life might have developed a different biological system different than that of emotions.

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> an intelligent life might have developed a different biological system

One theory is that some intelligences evolved the opposite to us. They started in pure silicon form and developed super-intelligence in the early stages and didn't evolve from carbon. They were /born/ computers and evolved from there into hyper-intelligence capable of exploring galaxies with Von Neumann probes[0]

[0] https://futurism.com/von-neumann-probe

Computers are a specifically engineered thing, they are not the sort of object that evolves naturally, at least not as an initial step (the first step is autonomous nourishment and, you know, motion). Silicon-based life forms would likely not be computer-like at all. They would probably still extract energy from oxygen and various other chemicals, they would have their own bacteria and fungi that eat and decompose silicon compounds, and they would probably still not survive in space.

Also, even though silicon has interesting properties on its own, carbon is kind of just better at everything else. It can make bigger and more stable structures, for example. Its oxide is also not, you know, a stable and unreactive solid. So it would be surprising for life forms not to use carbon extensively, unless it was much too rare, and in that case I honestly doubt it would get very far. As a building block, carbon is just outstanding, there is a reason life on Earth is based on it even though there is a thousand times more silicon than carbon on the planet.

> for example, through an instant rewiring of the brain that doesn't require any practice.

You might have an alien species that can copy the brain state of someone who already knows a task, or one that can gain skills extremely quickly through practice, but I don't think practice is going away. The fact that neural networks have been the only way we've been able to solve a lot of problems, which approximate the way that the human brain learns, is pretty strong evidence of this. You start out with some weights, you measure loss, you adjust weights, and then you try again.

Justice as an emotion might go away or exist in a different form, but the underlying reason why humans have a sense of justice is evolutionary psychology / game theory. Probably any life form which is shaped by evolutionary forces would have some similar instinct. (Certainly not all possible intelligent life forms though, I'd agree.)

> The fact that neural networks have been the only way we've been able to solve a lot of problems, which approximate the way that the human brain learns, is pretty strong evidence of this.

Chances are a lot of machine learning implementations can be replaced with just "boring" statistical models and achieve more power.

OTOH plenty of creatures don't need to learn. Does a mosquito need to learn? No, it spawns thousands of offspring and doesn't live very long. The high spawn rate means you have a wide variety of natural mutations in your offspring, meaning one or a few of them are likely to have higher fitness in a given niche. It doesn't matter if most die if a few go on to survive. This is the strategy many organisms use to dominate the world in far greater numbers than our own species.

I sure hope we don't have mass-reproducing space mosquitos in our future.

It's OK, space has too much radiation for things to migrate off world unshielded. Except if you are a tardigrade though, but the reasons for them being like that are due to the types of niches they occupy on earth. Mosquitos on earth that have some sort of space proof shielding in their exoskeleton would probably be quickly outcompeted by those more fit mosquitos that don't have to invest resources into this space proof exoskeleton.

> Chances are a lot of machine learning implementations can be replaced with just "boring" statistical models and achieve more power.

This is of course true, but the innovation in ML is not that a neural network (or whatever model) is equivalent to something else, it's finding the weights in the first place.

> The fact that neural networks have been the only way we've been able to solve a lot of problems, which approximate the way that the human brain learns, is pretty strong evidence of this

These are all difficult assertions to make because we're trying to prove a negative. Your claim is evidence that neural networks are one way to do it, and nobody's arging that. But it's not evidence that there doesn't exist a better way, or that alien life might evolve a different and even less optimal way.

Legs are pretty ubiquitous, even flying insects have them. If we'd never seen a fish or snake we might conclude that they're inevitable. Somebody that evolved to be rad-hard on a planet without a magnetosphere might conclude that life can't exist without the thick carapace that they're made of and only look for planets rich in silicon and calcium.

I agree with the legs example, but neural networks are basically a mathematical construct, and they solve problems that any other intelligent species in our universe would also have to face. I think if a better mathematical construct for solving those problems were possible, the process of natural selection probably would've found it by now.

We know that evolution has limitations in how it explores the state space; sometimes certain new developments depend upon past developments. But it seems to me that the development of a brain would hit relatively few of these barriers.

>through an instant rewiring of the brain that doesn't require any practice

How does the rewiring system know what the ideal end state is in advance, and how does the alien evaluate if the new state is fit for purpose?

I'm with you on justice though. A parasitic species might have a completely different view of rights and obligations than we do.

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