"Real" ringworlds

[Phoenix-D]

"no, i'm saying that a more complex piece of tin won't become intelligent. it just doesn't compute for me. so, if you take my belief that evolution didn't make me, then evelution couldn't have made me, therefore there's big hole in evelution. which states that our development is random."

I'll work backwards here. Evolution isn't always random. Mutations and to a certain extent genetic drift can be; natural selection is definitely not. To a certain extent it is- who happens to be in the path of the firestorm when it starts, who walks under the tree limb when it falls- but in most cases it isn't.

Did evolution make you? Nope. Wrong level again. Your parents made you. I would aruge that the human species is halfway out of the evolutionary process by now, because of modern medicine.

A more complex piece of tin will not become intelligent- intelligence is something limited to living systems, which a piece of tin is not. But a piece of tin CAN be made into something more complex that an uneducated person might not expect.

It works the same way with intelligence. Once you've got a brain- which is required to get above a certain level of complexity- it becomes a test. Does adding brain power increase survival or reproduction? If yes, the species's intelligence will probably increase. If not, it won't.

I agree with Dogscoff that intelligence is not a on/off switch, nor is there one type.