[rhet0rica]

You're absolutely right, and reflecting on it is why the article is horribly wrong. Humans are multimodal—they're ensemble models where many functions are highly localized to specific parts of the hardware. Biologically these faculties are "emergent" only in the sense that (a) they evolved through natural selection and (b) they need to be grown and trained in each human to work properly. They're not at all higher-level phenomena emulated within general-purpose neural circuitry. Even Nature thinks that would be absurdly inefficient!

But accelerationists, like Yudkowskites, are always heavily predisposed to believe in exceptionalism—whether it's of their own brains or someone else's—so it's impossible to stop them from making unhinged generalizations. An expert in Pascal's Mugging[1] could make a fortune by preying on their blind spots.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_mugging