https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=frp-5curl4s

Let’s say you’re an animal, and you act, and it doesn’t go very well, then you die. Well, you’ve learned that acting that way didn’t work, but now you’re dead. So that’s not that helpful. Then you might think, well, maybe you should represent how you’re going to act. So, you know, here’s a box with a snake in it, and your coffee cup is inside the box with the snake in it. And I say to you, imagine picking up the coffee cup. And you imagine it, and you think, oh, I’ll pick up that coffee cup, and then the snake will bite me, and I’ll die. And so then you decide that implementing the strategy of picking up the coffee cup is probably not a very good idea. And so that stupid idea has to die, and not you. And so Paupers idea was that the reason that we developed the capacity to abstract was so that our stupid ideas could die instead of us. And that’s really, it’s almost impossible to overstate how brilliant an observation that is. Because what it means is that as a standard animal, you would have to produce variants of yourself, reproductively, to go out into the world and try their hand at survival. And that’s pretty costly, because you have to produce all the biological replications of you. So you could only probably manage that maybe 13 times if you really, really worked at it. And then the cost of their failure is extraordinarily high, because they die. Well, you can just sit there and produce like 20 different versions of you, extending out over the next week or the next month, and you can run them through a simulation and kill off all the ones that you don’t regard as suitable, and then only implement the successful ones. Now, you know, you could debate about how accurate you might be at doing that, because it would depend on your knowledge. But we do know that intelligent people tend to do better across the course of their life. And so it does seem that there is some utility with regards to survival, or at least with regards to positioning in the dominance hierarchy, which is somewhat of a proxy for survival and for reproductive success. There’s some association between that and the ability to abstract. So we could say that part of the reason that people got smarter was because smarter people were more likely to stay alive. Now, I think it’s more complicated than that, too, because I believe that human males and females are in an evolutionary cognitive arms race, roughly speaking. And so as men get trickier, women get trickier to understand them, and then as women get trickier to understand, men get trickier to understand them. And so we’ve been chasing each other around this cortical expansion loop pretty much since we parted ways with our common, with the ancestor that we had in common with chimpanzees. And so that’s roughly about seven million years ago.