I'm not much interested in the content of problems they might find easy, that we find difficult to intractable, unless the content is illustrative of their thinking. Rather the how of it. Allowed would be considerations of how we think, as contrastive. — tim wood

This is a quote from a Scientific American article. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/

Octopuses and their relatives (cuttlefish and squid) represent an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Since my first encounters with these creatures about a decade ago, I have been intrigued by the powerful sense of engagement that is possible when interacting with them. Our most recent common ancestor is so distant—more than twice as ancient as the first dinosaurs—that they represent an entirely independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can connect with them as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. They are probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.

The intelligence and (possibly) consciousness of octopuses seems to me to provide evidence that the evolution of sentience is not an unlikely event. I've heard it speculated that human intelligence evolved in order to support complex social and linguistic behavior, but it is my understanding octopuses are not social. Maybe if we figure out what we share with these mollusks we'll have a better idea what we might share with extraterrestrial visitors.

The question here, and it's merely speculative, is what does that extra intelligence look like? What can they do that we cannot? And the parallel question, what would better thinking for humans look like? — tim wood

Well I suppose at that point Kantian vs. Utilitarian vs. Virtue ethics will be settled. I guess I'd just pray that Kant was right -- that any hyper-intelligent "rational" being is confined to deontological morality by virtue of practical reason -- though I'm not a Kantian, so I suspect it's more likely we'd be tortured to death, enslaved, or just plain obliterated.

Our visitors from VZ'X planet might have exactly the same intelligence as we have, but altogether lack a feature which is central to our minds -- emotion. Our emotions are integral to our mental functioning, but ants, bees, and termites -- three highly successful organisms sharing the planet, do not have emotions. Intelligence without emotion might function very effectively without the well-known disruptions (as well as the well known advantages) that emotion drives bring.

If the VS'Xians had to travel a long way in time and space to get here, I would think the absence of emotions would be a damned good thing. Imagine a tank full of humans having to live in very close quarters for a century. Think of the carnage when our inhibited rages were let loose. Our ship would arrive with only a few survivors, or none at all.

What can they do that we cannot? — tim wood

Come to visit us!

And the parallel question, what would better thinking for humans look like? — tim wood

Going to visit them.

Cephalopoda have tremendous camouflage capabilities which, alone, require a lot of brain. Given a lot of brain, it is perhaps unfortunate that they don't live longer (generally 2 years). There is a case of a deep ocean species that guards her eggs for almost almost 5 years -- very slow development at low temperatures. The mother is in pretty bad shape physically by the end of guard duty.

I was thinking more along the lines of how we might think, if our thinking was to be substantially more powerful. I, for example, think without awareness of what I am doing or how most of the time. We could call that non-linear, unorganized, unconscious thinking - and that has its place.

When I try to consciously think, i.e., think in an organized and structured way about a determinate subject matter, the word that best describes my process is linear thinking. I have on occasion brain-stormed, but that's essentially linear. I also try shotgun thinking, and when my ignorance is near total, I just make guesses and follow the emergent lines where they lead.

Is this the best possible? Or maybe just the best we can manage? Is it the gold standard for the universe? Can we imagine a better way?

I was thinking more along the lines of how we might think — tim wood

In a (specific, limited way) we don't know how we think; most of our thinking is carried out by the non-conscious mind. Is it linear? or non-linear? Both at once, I would guess, but the style used is not available for inspection. "Distinguishing linear and non-linear thinking was a popular parlor game a while back -- what... 40 years ago? Or 'left-brain/right brain thinking, or 'visual thinking', and so on. I strongly suspect that the non-conscious brain uses all sorts of strategies to process information and project ideas which we (our conscious minds) become aware of.

Is this the best possible? Or maybe just the best we can manage? — tim wood

I don't know... just a guess -- our brains are probably doing the best they can do. In any event, what we can do for our brains is supply the best information we can get our paws on. We can also arrange our day so that the brain has time to absorb and process the good-quality information we ought to pour in. Go for a long walk, do simple chores (like dishwashing, folding the laundry...) sit down and stare into a corner, whatever method works.

The question here, and it's merely speculative, is what does that extra intelligence look like? What can they do that we cannot? And the parallel question, what would better thinking for humans look like? — tim wood

That question was asked a billion times before. R.A Freitas asked it in the 1970s, and theorized the Sentience Quotient as a result. Its close to quack science, especially with all the assumptions made about neural processing speed, but its still interesting.

Freitas believed our ability to relate to another's existence depends in good part on relative proximity in SQ between the species of beings in question. A human is at +13, a dog at +11, even insects are estimated to hit +7. And we can barely communicate at all with beings within the mammalian cluster.

The Cray-1 in 1975 was put at +9. It is not unlikely that something that can traverse the gulfs of the void would be several points higher than us. It is no exaggeration to say that they very well may look at us the way we look at ants.

Is this the best possible? Or maybe just the best we can manage? Is it the gold standard for the universe? Can we imagine a better way? — tim wood

Some people have perfect memories. They can remember specific things that happened years ago. They can memorize long passages with one reading. Some people can do complex calculations in their heads without effort. Some people can play chess blindfolded against multiple opponents. Some people are so aware they can control their bodies and do amazing physical feats. Some people are so smart they can take a look at a difficult mathematical problem and see the answer intuitively. Every single thing I do, someone can do much, much better than I can.

Why is it hard to figure out what thinking better would be like? What would you be like if you were as good at everything as the person who was the best in the world at it?

Neil deGrasse Tyson had a disturbing thought — tim wood

Also - darn Neil deGrasse Tyson to heck. To that cold circle of heck where Dr. Phil, Malcolm Gladwell, and Oprah Winfrey belong.

When I try to consciously think, i.e., think in an organized and structured way about a determinate subject matter, the word that best describes my process is linear thinking. I have on occasion brain-stormed, but that's essentially linear. I also try shotgun thinking, and when my ignorance is near total, I just make guesses and follow the emergent lines where they lead. — tim wood

Being more intelligent wouldn't necessarily translate in a different "phenomenology of thinking". What you describe as linear thinking is just internal vocalisation. The process of thinking about what you hear yourself think has already taken place, and more than likely a half dozen alternatives of internal utterances were generated and discarded before the last one was selected for vividness.

A more intelligent being could simply translate into a being that can run a much larger pool of potential utterances at the same time, selecting or discarding them according to increasingly subtle error triggers.

darn Neil deGrasse Tyson to heck — T Clark

Those dratted science types!

The question here, and it's merely speculative, is what does that extra intelligence look like? — tim wood

While chimpanzees aren't more intelligent than humans overall, they do outperform us in certain areas. Here's what that looks like:

What can they do that we cannot?

Take the previous video and extrapolate. :)

And the parallel question, what would better thinking for humans look like?

It sounds boring but I think one of the defining marks of a more intelligent species would be a far more complex and interesting grammar (The movie Arrival I think was right on the money in it's focus on language!). I mean, one of the distinguishing marks of our human intelligence over animals is our abilty to 'talk about talk' instead of just talking about 'things': that is, human language exhibits a self-reflexive structure that is almost impossible for even the smartest chimp.

One result of this is that we have a much richer grammatical structure than any possible animal language: our ability to talk about how we talk allows us to used tensed words (past, present, future), qualify other words (adverbs, adjectives), and basically use all sorts of different kinds of words. Essentially, grammar allows us to categorize the world and how we talk about it in different and interesting ways. Now, if one compares grammar between different languages, one also gets a feel for how different grammars limit (and also enable) the way in which we can talk - and hence think - about things.

Further, grammar is a bit of a balancing act. A rich grammar helps us to talk about things in different ways, but we can't have too many grammatical categories because, well, we're cognitively limited. So one imagines - and this is the point, finally - that a far more intelligent being would be able to handle an ever richer set of grammatical categories than we can. It would be able to talk and think about the world in more interesting and more complex ways than we currently can.

I agree, but language can also be beguiling. It can deceive us into believing we are thinking something of unique meaning solely on the grounds that we have a unique term for it. It can create entire castles in the air simply by self-referential constructions in grammar.

I think a marker of higher intelligence might be the ability to freely talk about the 'talk about talk', but that particular discourse might well result in less use of language, not more.

Well, to take the content of your question to its obvious end, I think extreme intelligence would appear stupid and insane (I'll telly you why in a while)

Intelligence consists of making associations between objects (mental or physical) and the ability to think rationally i.e. logical thinking.

Associations between objects are easy to spot when the steps connecting them are small e.g. umbrella-rain, water-fire, etc. What happens when the connections between objects are separated by a greater number of nodes e.g. water-fire-oxygen-Joseph Priestly (1733)-Battle of Kirkuk (1733). In this case if I were to simply say water-Battle of Kirkuk you would think me suffering from what is called ''loosening of associations'' (I hope that's the correct terminology), a symptom of madness or stupidity.

A similar situation arises with logical thinking. Let's take mathematics for instance. It all starts with the definition of numbers and geometric shapes but all of that leads to theories in the sciences. So, I wouldn't actually be wrong in saying:
1.0=0
Therefore
2. Gravity F = G(m1*m2)/r^2

But no one will take you seriously because they can't see the connection or better still, the distance between premises and conclusion is too great to make sense.

So, in my opinion, hyper-intelligence will appear as stupidity or madness.

This is a quote from a Scientific American article. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/

Octopuses and their relatives (cuttlefish and squid) represent an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Since my first encounters with these creatures about a decade ago, I have been intrigued by the powerful sense of engagement that is possible when interacting with them. Our most recent common ancestor is so distant—more than twice as ancient as the first dinosaurs—that they represent an entirely independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can connect with them as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. They are probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.

The intelligence and (possibly) consciousness of octopuses seems to me to provide evidence that the evolution of sentience is not an unlikely event. I've heard it speculated that human intelligence evolved in order to support complex social and linguistic behavior, but it is my understanding octopuses are not social. Maybe if we figure out what we share with these mollusks we'll have a better idea what we might share with extraterrestrial visitors. — T Clark

These are interesting thoughts and observations. One thing I would like to note though is that brain size and even the sheer amount of cognitive activity should not be equated to what we usually think of as "intelligence." A lion's share (so to speak) of brain processing power - both in humans and in other animals like octopuses - is devoted to visual and other sense processing, involving little or no conscious reflection.

One idea I've been interested in for a while is that of higher-dimensional langauges: most languages are essentially two-dimensional linear scripts, and don't utilize the 'third' dimension of spatial position (as with chemical forumulas, where spatial relations between 'morphemes' matter). One possible way a higher intelligence could organize their grammar is by utelizing such dimensions so that, say, dependant clauses are located below independant clauses, or that future tenses are written in bold, past tenses in italic and so on. At the limit, an entire sentence, paragraph, book, or database of information could be condensed in a single high-dimentional figure: a differentially colored sphere, say (perhaps hue, value, and saturation might encode syntactic or semantic info!).

We would be literally too stupid to 'read' such a script (without help from a computer, at any rate) but it jibes with the notion that a higher intelligence might use 'less' language.

The Cray-1 in 1975 was put at +9. It is not unlikely that something that can traverse the gulfs of the void would be several points higher than us. It is no exaggeration to say that they very well may look at us the way we look at ants. — Akanthinos

Or they may have been around a little bit longer, or their scientific and technological achievement curve was a little steeper for whatever reason. We've only been around as a species for a few hundred thousand years - a wink on the universal scale - and our achievement curve has a hockey stick shape, with the upward slope occurring over the last few hundred years. Perhaps all it takes is for a species very similar to ours to be slightly offset in time or to have a slightly different history.

Well I suppose at that point Kantian vs. Utilitarian vs. Virtue ethics will be settled. I guess I'd just pray that Kant was right -- that any hyper-intelligent "rational" being is confined to deontological morality by virtue of practical reason -- though I'm not a Kantian, so I suspect it's more likely we'd be tortured to death, enslaved, or just plain obliterated. — John Doe

Heh, you don't have to go far for examples - no need for intergalactic travel - just look at us. Kantian or not, that's what we've been doing with each other, not to mention other animals.

I can't see any biological beings traversing interstellar space, not even in suspended animation. Even a a year in a space station, still protected by the Earth's magnetic shield and well within the heliosheath, is enough to leave astronauts physically harmed.

It would probably be easier to recreate humans a la Westworld than to make them capable of long haul space travel into deep space, although I suppose infestations of helpful nanodes might do the job.

A major limitation of human consciousness is the opacity of other minds, that we can only perceive reality from our single standpoint, here and now. In the future I can imagine more advanced consciousness stemming from multiple networked brains/intelligent entities.

Each of those multiple perspectives could theoretically be swept up into a larger single perspective in a manner somewhat analogous to the way as our brains collect the disparate information from our senses. That is, most of the information would be discarded, and the prioritised impressions would be patched together to create a single overarching cohesive moment-by-moment perspective of multiple, simultaneous viewpoints.

It would not be a hive mind as such because each networked person would still enjoy a personal, particular and independent consciousness - which would be used by some kind of advanced AI processor to make sense of each (extremely complex) input in real time.

Strictly speaking, the processor would be the owner of the higher intelligence, but there would surely be systems allowing for at least some of the "higher mind" to feed back and inform the networked people, the subsidiary minds.

It's hard to imagine how that would play out to us simpler beings if we met such a composite mind. Perhaps they would seem all-knowing in much the same way as our parents seem omniscient when we were toddlers? I can imagine composite-minded aliens to not have nearly the trouble communicating that's anticipated by NDGT. We humans don't understand the languages of other species because we are not yet advanced enough, either in conceptions or technology. It was not so long ago that most people naively (and sadly) believed other species to be akin to simple versions of Chalmers's philosophical zombies - utterly without sentience, emotion or even true sensation. Just reflexes.

A civilisation capable of interstellar travel may well have solved many problems with interspecies communication that still flummox humankind. It's a fledgling area of research.

At the limit, an entire sentence, paragraph, book, or database of information could be condensed in a single high-dimentional figure: a differentially colored sphere, say (perhaps hue, value, and saturation might encode syntactic or semantic info!). — StreetlightX

Yes, this touches on much of what I think philosophy of language is (or should be) focussed on. We could make our language more efficient, express more with less, by utilising all sorts of additional communicative devices, but do we want to? At the extreme perhaps your multi-dimensional language sphere, but at the lower end, we already use italics, single quotations, exclamation marks (even, god-forbid, emoticons, which I'm far too English and old-fashioned to condone the use of). We also make use of sentance word order and this is interestingly used in different ways by different languages to convey meaning that is just not conveyable otherwise,

I know it's not strictly three-dimensional in the sense that you mean, but if you consider the overlap that word-order (Subject-Object-Verb), and word morphological marking (like tense agreement) potentially have, then fully utilising both could give one a three-dimensional language - verbs which change meaning based both on their position relative to the object and their tense-implying agreement. I'd be interested to know if any extant languages actually make use of both already, since both are available, but I don't know of any.

The interesting thing for me, is that I'm not personally convinced that this would be utilised this way even if it were available. It kind of pre-supposes that the complexity of language is a necessary evil resulting from the complexity of that which we wish to communicate. I'm not convinced it is.

I see language as a kind of emergent feature from the chaos of billions of fairly cack-handed communication attempts. Each time we attempt to communicate some thing to another person, we add a little bit to this sea of possible language-rules with our own particular guess as to how it works. Out of this emerges some rule-like centre, but very fuzzy around the edges and extremely messy at the outer limits.

This may or may not be a particularly efficient way to do it, but yes, I could conceivably imagine a highly intelligent alien species deciding that the whole method was extremely inefficient and replacing it with something else entirely. Only alien poets would still communicate using something as inefficient as language in the sense we know it.

Heh, you don't have to go far for examples - no need for intergalactic travel - just look at us. Kantian or not, that's what we've been doing with each other, not to mention other animals. — SophistiCat

I mean, I take the really interesting question that is gesturing towards -- let's call it the upshot of Tyson's slightly flippant talk -- is what aspects of human life are distinctly human and which aspects of human life are inherent to any creature endowed with the capacity for rationality.

Of course, it's not that black-and-white, there could possibly be a nexus of family resemblances, but the thought experiment is still very interesting. There's nothing like scientific proof available to us as self-interpreting creatures alone on earth in our capacity for rationality. So I take it that, on what I understand to be a Kantian view, what we have "been doing with each other, not to mention other animals" is a failure to properly exercise our moral capacity for practical rationality, or something (imo slightly dumb) like that. Or, like, if early Heidegger is right, then I take it these aliens would be self-interpreting Daseins. And then it would be interesting to see how they grapple with the issue of authenticity/inauthenticity since they are capable of more refined rationality.

This is actually why I doubt the possibility of rationally-capable extraterrestrial life, I just think we're too unique to be a meaningful basis for inferences about life elsewhere in the universe.