Humaniqueness

We alone are makers of meaning

When you set side by side the human brain and whatever is the best AI model on offer, the human brain looks mild and ascetic. But when you set side by side the human brain and the smartest animal brain - dolphin, octopus, crow, take your pick - the human brain looks wolfish and piggish.

I think it’s stupefying that the human brain, with its low energy requirements, can be completely open-ended in its power to create and do things. And when we are armed with knowledge, which is something we can seek to uncover as much as possible and as fast as possible, the only real boundaries are the laws of physics themselves. Now consider AI, which requires an extraordinary amount of energy to carry a few number of tasks, which amount to only a tiny fraction of what’s possible. And even if one adds hundreds of nuclear power plants behind the best AI model, then that would only allow the model to mimic more things, not reckon with the meaning of them. From this, the human brain stands apart and stands alone: it makes meaning with next to no effort, and much of that is subconscious. It’s the very opposite of the AI program, which mimics with a great deal of effort, and all of it with visible data.

Even so, the human brain, which needs a steady supply of no more energy than what powers a light bulb, is the most expensive organ in the human body. In fact, it turns out that compared to our ancient ancestors, the human brain’s energy demands have blown up. Not only that, it turns out that the energy needed by the brain is above and beyond the minimum needed for the running of the body. And not only that, it turns out that many features of the human body have slowed their growth so that more energy can be rerouted to the human brain.

What is going on here?

The brains of animals, however, make none of these greedy demands. To them, their response to something like fear is genetic and thus fixed. They cannot reimagine fear to be anything else because that needs a new meaning to be made, and animals cannot make meaning.

For a thing as greedy and costly as the human brain to evolve, the ancient selection pressures must have been savagely intense. What remarkable benefit could match such remarkable cost? What do we apply so heavily that animals don’t need at all?

It turns out that humans in their history have had to faithfully pass down ideas, and that such ideas had to stay intact for people to survive. And the more ideas that had to be passed down for survival, the easier it became for any of the ideas to become undone, and this failure was fatal. However, it is easier to pass on more ideas intact if you know what they mean instead of trying to mimic their forms. This favoured ancestors who understood the underlying idea rather that its form. They could create a meaning, and test it against the idea to see if it held up or not. This allowed them to pass on more and more ideas intact by understanding what they meant, not what they looked like. Because the same meaning can underly many different forms, and the same form can have many meanings. Meaning was more thus reliable to transmit ideas faithfully.

But the ability to create meaning is the same as creating a new idea. Creativity is what we modern humans call it. And so the very same thing that allowed our ancients to pass down ideas intact, also allowed them to create new ideas altogether. Thus the human mind can create new ideas to new problems even in new environments. And this ability to create meaning on the fly has allowed human ideas to create knowledge very, very fast. A human can create and kill ideas without killing themselves, whereas other species’ knowledge can at most only evolve through their death.

In other words, the human brain’s power has been enhanced to uphold the human mind’s creativity. As a result, human evolution put human hardware, along with the rest of the physical world, at the mercy of human software. This is why humans, unlike animals, make skyscrapers rise out of deserts within a single lifetime, and leave footprints on a faraway moon.