Evolution-Bootstrapped Simulation: Artificial or Human Intelligence: Which Came First?
This is a speculative, incremental thought experiment questioning the origins of intelligence, with no direct practical application.
The paper challenges the assumption that humans created AI by proposing that neural networks might have evolved naturally before humans, based on their lower algorithmic complexity, and suggests this could lead to evolution-bootstrapped simulation.
Humans have created artificial intelligence (AI), not the other way around. This statement is deceptively obvious. In this note, we decided to challenge this statement as a small, lighthearted Gedankenexperiment. We ask a simple question: in a world driven by evolution by natural selection, would neural networks or humans be likely to evolve first? We compare the Solomonoff--Kolmogorov--Chaitin complexity of the two and find neural networks (even LLMs) to be significantly simpler than humans. Further, we claim that it is unnecessary for any complex human-made equipment to exist for there to be neural networks. Neural networks may have evolved as naturally occurring objects before humans did as a form of chemical reaction-based or enzyme-based computation. Now that we know that neural networks can pass the Turing test and suspect that they may be capable of superintelligence, we ask whether the natural evolution of neural networks could lead from pure evolution by natural selection to what we call evolution-bootstrapped simulation. The evolution of neural networks does not involve irreducible complexity; would easily allow irreducible complexity to exist in the evolution-bootstrapped simulation; is a falsifiable scientific hypothesis; and is independent of / orthogonal to the issue of intelligent design.