Today I read an article in the NY Times about Klotho. It’s a hormone that has been shown to cause mice to live longer and become effectively smarter in various ways.
And that got me wondering. What would happen should some runaway virus suddenly cause every human on the planet to become much more intelligent?
Which got me thinking about the entire question of intelligence. What does it really mean that we are “intelligent”? Is intelligence a linear scale that can keep going up without limit?
It’s a tricky question partly because “intelligence” is such an elusive quality. We might say that we are more intelligent than, say, a dog or an octopus. But the truth is that we are differently intelligent than a dog or an octopus.
Dogs can use their brains to easily do things — like follow a cold trail or recognize one scent among many — that are far beyond human capabilities. We aren’t even sure how dogs are able to do such things, let alone duplicate those capabilities.
An octopus can perform quite independent tasks with each of its eight tentacles, all working simultaneously on different subtasks to solve complex problems together like a very high functioning team. No individual human can do that.
So it’s not just a matter of “more intelligent”, but rather a matter of “more intelligent in the way that a human is already intelligent”. But even that restricted definition is complicated.
Do we mean better at math? Better at languages? Better at reading subtle changes in facial or bodily expression to precisely infer the emotional state of other humans?
What would we become if we were to become twice as good at these things? Or ten times as good? Would we still be essentially human, or would we become something else entirely — something that nobody today would recognize?
Poul Anderson wrote a marvelous novel about how this might happen. Sort of like Vernor Vinge’s “slow zones” where the earth moves out of those into a faster zone and what happens to all of the living beings on the planet as a result.
I am one of those rare people that have two APOE e4 genes (mentioned in the Klotho article). I am in a study taking a drug that 1. might work (probably low probability), 2. might not be a placebo (60% probability). One nice side effect of this is I get copies of my brain MRI to play with. I have one from a year ago and will be getting another one in a few months. It will be interesting to compare them. Looking at your own brain is a very different form of self-awareness than most ever get. I have had zero symptoms and my brain scans are very, very healthy looking. I figure I have at least another decade or more within which a cure might be found.
This caused me to read up a bit on Klotho. Turns out I also have two T genes (rs9536314) that express increased klotho protein. (via 23andme). Perhaps balance is restored to the universe, LOL.