The space of minds

The space of possible intelligences is vast, with animal intelligence and LLM intelligence representing fundamentally different optimization pressures: animals are shaped by natural selection for survival in embodied, multi-agent, adversarial environments requiring general competence across diverse tasks, while LLMs are optimized through statistical imitation of human text combined with reinforcement learning for user approval and specific task rewards. This difference in optimization pressure—biological evolution for survival versus commercial evolution for problem-solving and engagement—explains why LLMs lack the robust generality of animal intelligence despite operating on entirely different computational substrates, making them humanity's first contact with genuinely non-animal intelligence.

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