The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

She pushed her brain back to Turkish—her second language. There, the third-person pronoun “o” bore no gender marker. “O” presented no problems. It could stand for the English “he,” “she,” or “it” or the singular “they.” Ha began referring to Evrim, in her mind, with the Turkish “o”—round as its form, holistic, inclusive. The gender problem disappeared, and the feeling of dissonance began to fade. It was replaced with pure awe, and wonder.

Evrim’s existence implicated yours. It implied you, too, were nothing more than a machine—a swarm of preprogrammed impulses iterating endlessly.

“We’ve seen tons of signs of octopus intelligence. Creativity, multi-step problem solving, compound tool use, evidence of theory of mind, long-term learning, and a high degree of individuation.

“But what about the locations they call Octopolis and Octlantis, off the east coast of Australia? They are both continuously inhabited sites with octopuses in every season.”

Had to google it, but these are real locations!

Let’s put forward the idea that evolution accelerates due to environmental pressures.

Simplified language pushing a false narrative regarding evolution

“Through RNA editing—swapping out one RNA base for another. They can produce molecular diversity quickly, particularly in their nervous systems. It’s an alternative engine for evolution,” Evrim said.

NO THEYRE NOT UNDERSTANDING IT CORRECTLY THIS IS A MISINTERPRETATION ITS POST TRANSCRIPTIONAL EDITING WHICH MEANS IT ISNT PASSED SLONG THIS MEANS OCTOPI DONT EVOLVE AS FAST!!! NO I WAS REALLY GOING INTO THIS OPEN MINDED!! THIS IS THE WORST THING TO EVER HAPPEN TO ME!!!

Yes—RNA editing. It’s unique to cephalopods—and, admittedly, it’s fast.

NO IT ISNT!!

So, if evolution accelerates due to environmental pressures, and the octopus adapts quickly via RNA editing to those pressures, it follows that you put an octopus species under pressure, it could change much more quickly than non-cephalopods…”

Poste transcriptional RNA editing allows for organism specific adaptation, not an inheritable trait. BY DEFINITION.

The octopus that survives is the one whose parent sticks around long enough to teach it after its birth, because that mutation would give it a huge advantage over competitors. You might see new RNA coding emerge that rewarded more longevity—a mating and death timing that enabled nurturing of the young, rewarded social skills.

oh yeah because That’s how longevity mutations work. Oh my god.

An android inside and out: a robot not only human in appearance, but human in…” Evrim hesitated. “I’m not sure what to name it. In consciousness? But they still do not agree as to whether I am truly conscious or not—though I believe I am.”

Ha thought: No. You are not human in consciousness. Or in anything else. You are singular, and new.

Because we are linguistic, creative beings, we can better think through things, solve much more complex problems. We can imagine how things might be, might have been, might become.

The truth is, it was never her intent to create an android that could be just like a human. Not for a moment. What she wanted was to create a mind that was human, to a degree—but improved. Wiped clean of its limitations, as she saw them. She wanted to create a mind that could learn perfectly, and totally: a mind free from forgetfulness, from the need to rest or search for food. A mind that could contemplate every moment it had ever experienced with perfect recall, and use that knowledge.

To build the next Evrim, a mind more advanced than mine.

Using octopi to build better AI?? Help hahaha the connections between the two suddenly make sense

‘When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.’

Anti progressionist in tone, if not technically true via logical fallacies. Fear of progress because of what progress could technically be capable of is regressive and often dangerous.

She recognized that look: A scientist watching a test subject. A biologist, examining a DNA sequence.

this pmo