Humans find it hard to imagine intelligences smarter than we are because we’re designed by evolution to ignore the problems we can’t solve and focus on those we can. Doing it any other way would be an inappropriate use of resources.

What are the top five elements in your body and their relative proportions? You can’t answer? What’s taking you so long? You don’t even know what you’re made of?

Fact is, humans are pretty damn stupid. Not stupid relative to me or stupid relative to Einstein, but stupid in the scheme of things. Stupid relative to what we could be. We can offer any number of excuses, but in the end they’re nothing but excuses.

Homo sapiens evolved out of the primordial muck. We’re what happens when the muck gets just barely smart enough to reflect upon itself and manipulate its environment significantly.

There are two anthropic pressures at play here. Let’s assume, like Max Tegmark and other physicists, that we live in a gigantic multiverse where all possibilities are realized. The sector of the multiverse capable of harboring intelligent life, or life of any type, is extremely small. If our spatial dimensionality were different, or the intensity of the strong force, or the fine structure constant, or any number of other fundamental constants varied by even a tiny bit, life in this universe would be impossible. Tipler and Barrow beat this point into the ground in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, but we’ve seen it already from numerous physicists.

The first anthropic pressure is the probabilistic bias towards chaos, disorder, and inhospitability to life, intelligent life in particular. In most of the multiverse life is impossible. But in some tiny portion, in which we (surprise!) happen to find ourselves, intelligent life just barely was able to evolve out of the muck and acquire enough cognitive complexity to consciously kill each other and compete for mates instead of just doing so mindlessly.

The second anthropic pressure is slightly more speculative. It’s the idea that intelligent species that are too smart wipe themselves out too quickly to really get anywhere. They build self-improving AIs that ignore their creators and tile the cosmic neighborhood with value structures that are a mere shadow of what the programmers originally meant, or launch superintelligent uploads who slowly, and then quickly become obsessed with the idea of constantly stimulating their own pleasure centers to the exclusion of all other pursuits. Both outcomes radically reduce the number of conscious individuals in existence after that point, thereby selecting those quadrants of spacetime out of the anthropic lottery. We’re unlikely to be born into those regions because they are relatively uninhabited, just like we’re unlikely to be born in universes where infant stars have so much gravity that their accretion discs get sucked in before forming stable planets.

We are born in regions that are typical. Industrial civilizations filled with billions of non self-modifying intelligent social animals, apparently. We’re relatively unintelligent because 1) we just evolved from the muck and 2) because we haven’t been clever enough to destroy ourselves yet. Two factors, any one of which alone would be enough to hold the argument up.

But, worry not. There is no reason to despair. These anthropic arguments for our relative stupidity only underscore our potential for growth. We can improve our quality of life to new heights we could never even dream of.

There is an issue of concern, however. If the future is so much more prosperous and populous than today, then why don’t we find ourselves there, instead of here? If out of every 1,000,000 random beings, only one finds itself in civilizations with only a few billion people, then is it just an enormous coincidence that we happen to find ourselves here?

Coincidence is not good enough. There are reasons to believe that this probabilistic issue is a huge problem. It’s called the Doomsday Argument. You can find numerous rebuttals in the Wikipedia article, but many of them are quite subtle, and if you dismiss the argument merely based on its implications, then I think we can justifiably throw out your opinion.

What is your reason for dismissing the Doomsday Argument? Or if you don’t have one, how do you cope?