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0 pointsRetric17d ago0 comments

Efficiency by what metrics?

When aircraft can carry onboard oil refineries and drilling rigs you can more reasonably compare them to birds. Without that you need to consider ATP vs jet fuel or crude oil vs a dead fish? Skeletal muscle can be 40+% efficient depending on what exactly you’re measuring.

Going head to head vs evolution in a similar design space with similar tools and goals, arranging neurons for useful thinking, is vary different than increasing top speed while sacrificing just about everything else.

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bondarchuk17d ago

>When aircraft can carry onboard oil refineries and drilling rigs you can more reasonably compare them to birds.

This is a fair point in general, but the whole point in this context is not that human design is more efficient at duplicating an entire organism, but that it can be more efficient at narrowly defined tasks. Evolution has never had the goal 'evolve human consciousness as quickly and efficiently as possible', it just had the goal (and even calling it that is stretching things of course, but let's say an emergent goal) of reproducing organisms.

RetricOP17d ago

> can be more efficient at narrowly defined tasks

My point was in narrowly defined task of turning chemical energy to motion, a Jet engine is less efficient than muscle fibers if you use ATP as the point of comparison. Biology got really efficient at that very narrowly defined task.

> Evolution has never had the goal 'evolve human consciousness as quickly and efficiently as possible'

Evolving as efficiently as possible isn’t the goal. But turn an egg into human consciousness as efficiently as possible is definitely a goal, of course it gets to leverage everything else the brain needs to be doing rather than starting from scratch here.

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