[eli5] Why did humans advance so far so fast while other intelligent animals did not?
In: 944
The evolutionary jackpot that human beings struck that no other species has yet is *computational universality*.
Other intelligent species have specialized brains that can handle specific types of problem solving well. Human beings are the only species to be able to externalize our thinking through a series of tricks we have that others don’t which allow us to act as *Turing complete* systems.
A system that is *Turing complete* is capable of computing (solving) anything that is computable as opposed to just solving very specific types of problems. In other words, it is a universal problem solver.
What makes a system Turing complete? In language, a system is Turing-complete if it has conditional branching (concepts like “if” and “then”) and the ability to store data in an arbitrarily large and flexible amount of memory. Once a system has that, it probable that it can solve any kind of problem that can be solved.
What makes human’s Turing complete? Sure we have conditional language but we don’t have arbitrarily large memories:
*writing*
The ability to write things down — or more precisely, the ability to tokenize concepts into language that can be captured and represented outside of our heads — externalizes part of our our brains the way fire externalized part of our our digestion. With that change, we became universal problem solvers.
We had the capacity for this kind of externalized universal thought for hundreds of thousands of years before societies cracked it and we saw an intelligence explosion. You can trace the handful of conceptual inventions that enabled humans to explosively outcompete other similar species.
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