Ask Zompist: Rescuing dualism

I had a quibble about Dennett’s conservation-of-energy argument against dualism.  His argument, I’d agree, is pretty damaging for dualist theories that imply that the soul can affect the body, but there are at least three distinct forms of dualism that don’t:

1) The view that the soul is sort of like a field generated and sustained by the body, which takes its character at any particular moment from the character of the body at that moment.  Probably the most popular among dualists in academic philosophy these days.

2) The view that the soul’s essence is partially separate from that of the body–that the soul takes some of its character at any particular moment from the body’s character at that same moment, but that it also has some characteristics that aren’t derived from the body.  Maybe more of a theistic position than #1.

3) The view that the body and soul are entirely separate causally, and that their coincidence is the indication that the Creator made Creation to be well-ordered.  Leibnitz and I think a few Indic philosophers took this view, but it doesn’t seem to be talked about much anymore.

So it’s a pretty strong argument against two-way causality between body and soul–which might be all he really needs for the arguments he’s making.  But I don’t see it answering the more fundamental suspicion that there’s something above and beyond material reality.  Could you clarify how Dennett’s argument changed your mind?

—weserei

You’re quite right that (1) and (2) escape Dennett’s argument unscathed.  However, the price for accepting them is that the soul becomes a mere spectator, with no ability to influence the world— even to move your eyes to look left.  What fun is that?  Or to put it more academically, what is the philosophical gain?  The appeal of dualism is that it fits our naive conception of ourselves.  But that conception includes the idea that we affect the world.

Of course, this might actually appeal to some people— Calvin, for example.  But I don’t get the appeal of such determinism anyway.  Theologically, I think it arises from the feeling that attributing causation to anything but God somehow diminishes him.  But it also makes him morally responsible for evil, which seems like a poor trade. 

As for (3), it’s possible, in the same sense that it’s possible that you’re a brain in a vat.  And it’s unbelievable for the same reason: the level of piddly detail required of the vat scientists or God is just too immense. 

I should note that there’s a fourth possibility: there is an energy input required to move the body, and we just haven’t noticed it yet.   Dennett’s argument isn’t a proof.   (One might even posit that another dualistic effect causes energy to disappear at about the same rate so that one couldn’t (say) detect the soul by testing the conservation of heat.   But it’s a useful heuristic in science that making phenomena hard to verify is a sign of pseudo-science.)

The other problem with dualism is that it’s something of a dead end, especially when it’s used as a rearguard fight against science.  Explaining cognition is a magnificent challenge for materialists, and has huge ramifications for robotics, computer science, psychology, medicine.  Even if it turned out to be wrong, we’ve already learned a lot and the failure would teach us more.  Dualism has no such program; you can posit a soul, but what can we learn from it?

 

Ask Zompist: Cloud computing

Since ideas like cloud computing are taking center stage, are arguments against open source losing ground?

Also is the current move toward the cloud a good thing for software or not?

—Joe Baker

My last job was in a SaaS company, so I’m familiar with some of the advantages.  It’s great for the seller— you get ongoing revenue instead of single sales; you can easily update all your customers— and it has advantages for enterprise customers: easily deployable, centrally manageable, presumably more reliable.

I think it makes the most sense for side apps— things like source control or survey software that you want to be widely available, but aren’t where most people spend most of their working hours.  For main apps, local teams, not the head office, should be able to choose the best tools.  If I’m spending most of my day using a tool, my team will make a better choice than some clueless IT autocrat.

I’m dubious about cloud computing in general, because there’s all this power in the desktop computer— why avoid it?  It mostly seems like an end run around Microsoft.  But if it works, it won’t produce the Open Source Utopia; it’ll produce a software world dominated by Google rather than Microsoft.

Also see Joel Spolsky’s delicious takedown of the architecture astronauts, particularly Microsoft’s version of cloud computing.

You mentioned Steam, which is an interesting model… it has cloud computing elements, in that your game permissions are stored externally (which makes it easy to change computers— a great boon as I’ve done it twice in the last year), yet the apps it manages are local desktop apps (which makes a lot more sense for games).  That’s a good balance, taking the advantages of cloud computing but not forcing it to do what it’s not good at.

 

Ask Zompist: Nuclear Iran

What do you take of this hoopla over the Iranian nuclear program? More specifically, what do you make of the opinions that Iran is secretly, or intending to, enrich weapons-grade uranium has any merit, or is a response to some US insecurity? (Notwithstanding the Bush administration’s attempt to garner a free pass to make a “pre-emptive” strike against Iran with nuclear weapons.)

—Nikolai

After Iraq, any such speculation needs a huge damn disclaimer: EXPERT OPINION MAY BE TALKING OUT OF ITS ASS.  Hussein was just as cagey as the Iranians about international inspections, well past the point where he was obviously undermining his own survival— all to protect, in fact, nothing.  It seems irrational, but not so much if we consider that a) he couldn’t be seen as weak domestically, as would happen if he showed that his nuclear threat was nonexistent; and b) dictators and enemies of the US hate the idea of UN inspectors running all over their territory.

So, if the experts don’t know for sure, I sure don’t, sitting here in my living room.

Of course, where there’s smoke, there is sometimes fire— North Korea, Pakistan, and India, despite years of denial, really were developing nukes.  In some ways the question is why the Iranians haven’t got them yet— are they having trouble with the differential equations or something?

What do we do about it?  There’s an old philosophical maxim that no argument can turn an is into a should.  We might add, no amount of punditry can turn a should into a will.  Take this article by Lee Smith at Slate, for instance, which warns that nothing less than American hegemony over Arabian oil is at stake.  Fine, Lee, what should we do?  He warns against leaving it to Israel on the grounds that “there are some things that need to be done by the alpha dog”, but he neglects to say what those things are.

Few things are more pathetic that bellicosity without follow-through.  The Right always wants us to be a badass, but the days are over when this could be done by landing a couple thousand Marines.  Maybe negotiation will work; it’s worth a try.  Let’s be honest: the alternative is going to war with Iran.  Is the country ready to do that?  (Quick factoid: Iran is double the population and four times the size of Iraq.  Do we have the few hundred thousand troops on hand that would be needed?  Since we’re still far from having stable allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, what makes us think we’d have one in Iran?)

If we’re not going to go to war, there’s precious little deterrence gained by threatening to do it.  It’s not like the Iranians can’t figure this out.

What about letting Israel do it?  It’s mounted such attacks before, on Iraq and Syria, with astonishing impunity.  The Iranians know this too, and it probably has more deterrence effect than the disapproval of the West.  But it’s a huge gamble as it could easily set off a larger war.  Iran’s obvious counter-move would be to attack not Israel but us, in Iraq.

Could we deal with Iran having the bomb?  Probably.  Nukes are better defensive than offensive weapons— actually using them means that someone will use them back at you, and the Iranians don’t want to lose Tehran, or Qom, or their oil fields.  Especially after the Iraq war, nukes add security to rogue states.   No one is more convinced by Kim Jong-il’s rhetoric than before he had them, but he’s that much more safe from invasion.

The irony here is that inside Iran, much more than inside Iraq, there’s an ally waiting to be born.  The Iranians have had a generation to get thoroughly tired of Islamic fundamentalism, and many have bravely taken to the streets to defy it.  It’s hard to say how we could encourage this domestic opposition; but I think it’s clear that trying to be a badass is the best way to strengthen the regime.  We might have learned that from our own experience after 9/11, or from our asinine Cuba policy: nothing helps authoritarians more against their internal enemies than an external threat.

 

Ask Zompist: Language revival

I read about the world’s lop-sided linguistic situation— where handful of big languages (e.g. English, French, Spanish, Arabic, various Chinese languages, etc.) dominate, and how the ones that do not (e.g. Welsh, Breton, Hawaiian, various aboriginal languages of Americas and Australia, etc.) are dying off, with some people and organizations (even governments) to prevent and try to reverse this trend. Do you think it is possible for these small languages to survive in the modern world; or is it enviable that they will just die off, the attractions of the big languages being (like cities) too great. I’ve heard that only one language has really successfully been revived: Hebrew. Is this true? If it is, why is so. If it isn’t, what can be learned from the Hebrew revival that can possibly be applied to other language revivals? Also, how important do you think government policy on language is? What do you think is the best government policy toward language.

—Christopher

Language revival, and people’s thoughts in general about what other people should speak, often go astray for failure to address a huge fact: languages are hard to learn.  It’s a multi-year commitment, best done in childhood (not because children are better at it but because they have the time for it).  And at the community level, it doesn’t really work unless almost the whole community makes that effort.

The irony is that public policy through the 1950s or so was the opposite of today’s concerns: people seemed to be terrified that minorities had their own languages, and did their best to discourage and destroy them.  But languages that survived this now faced a greater threat: modern communications and mobility.  Learning the national language becomes is the easiest thing to do, and once the younger generation isn’t taught the minority language any more, it’s likely to die out.

You’re right that Hebrew is the one clear case of language revival.  However, it had two great advantages that most other attempts lack:

1. There was a large population with a good non-native understanding of the language.  There was thus less trouble finding adults to jump-start educating the kids.
2. It became the language of a state, and thus something people had to learn.  You’re not soon going to see this happening with Hawai’ian or Cherokee.

That’s not to say it can’t be done.  Many people are trying, with anything from Cornish to Ainu to Amerindian languages.  It’s just that token efforts (naming it “official”, sprinkling a few words around,  having a half-hour class once a week) won’t do the trick.

Modern communications offers advantages, too: activists and language learners can easily connect up; recordings make it easier to share the spoken language; desktop or web publishing is easier and cheaper than print.

Governments can help by e.g. funding immersion schools and production of cultural material.  Sometimes unexpected things help: e.g. the Peruvian government required a fraction of Peruvian content on the radio, which led to a lot of exposure of Quechua songs.  People respond to cultural content much more readily than government decrees!

As to how successful efforts have been, I found this interesting discussion from people who know more about it than I do:

Language Hat: Reviving Passamaquoddy

 

Ask Zompist: Newspeak

I’ve been rereading the Appendix to 1984. The Party planned to ditch English and have all its members speaking Newspeak only by 2050. (It’s not certain what they planned for the Proles; O’Brien thought they were ineducable, in which case they would still be using Oldspeak.) But Newspeak was designed to have no redundancy in its lexicon and also to be spoken in a rapid, monotonous voice, with no variation of stress or tone (duckspeak) which would make it very hard to follow even in a moderately noisy environment. Do you think a language like that is viable?

—Mornche Geddick

Your question was an opportunity to reread Orwell’s description of Newspeak.  I think it’s a brilliant satire of totalitarian and authoritarian modes of thought; it should be read along with his less fantastical but equally perceptive “Politics and the English Language”.

The main sources or targets seem to be these:

• An aesthete’s aggrieved reaction to the regularities of artificial languages like Esperanto.  Though this is slightly provincial— what’s wrong with agglutinative languages?— it fits in very well with the Party’s blunt destruction of everything from the past.
• The careless meaninglessness and deceitfulness of political jargon.
• The Soviet fashion for syllabic abbreviations, e.g. Sovnarkom for “council of people’s commisioners”.

But that’s not your question.  Would it work?  As a written language, purposely impoverished in meaning and cut off from the past, I don’t see why not.  There are clear examples of the latter: Atatürk’s adoption of the Roman alphabet cut off Turks from centuries of literature; the adoption of báihuà (the Mandarin vernacular) over wényán (the classical literary language), plus the script reform, did the same for China.  To be sure scholars in both cases could continue to learn and study past works, but it was a new barrier.

Could the Party keep the new language immaculate of heretical meanings?  Only by retaining absolute power, which of course is a political not a linguistic question.

Newspeak depends on what’s normally called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; it was intnded to make all other modes of thought but Ingsoc impossible.  But if the political side wasn’t there, I doubt that the linguistic side would hold up.  Suppose the totalitarian state simply collapses, as in V for Vendetta: would the absence of metaphorical uses of “free” continue?  I doubt it; people would simply invent new words or senses.  Writing in 1948, with all the European empires intact, Orwell might suppose that uneducated peoples (denied access to sophisticated liberal thought) could never rebel; I think it’s clear by now that this was wrong— despite his own hatred for imperialism, Orwell grossly underestimated the capacities of non-Europeans.

As for the monotonous delivery “without involving the higher brain centres at all”, I think this should be taken as a parody of political speeches, especially the propagandists for extremists, mouthing out verbiage with no concern for careful thought, beauty, or internal contradiction.  In the world of 1984, it wasn’t a bug but a feature if torrents of Newspeak were hard to follow; the aim was the suppression of thought and progress.

 

Ask Zompist: Advice for the Infected

How do I stop sucking as an Infected?

–Brainsless

Left 4 Dead is a team game, so the first question is, are you and your fellow monsters playing well together?  You should be talking, telling each other what you’re doing, coordinating attacks, noting weaknesses. 

Use the maps to your advantage.  Areas like the basement in the No Mercy subway, or the cornfield in the Blood Harvest finale, are inherently confusing for the Survivors.  Places where they have to drop down to another level and can’t get back up again are excellent places to jump the stragglers. 

Height is your friend– all the attacks work better if you can attack from above.

Hang out in front of a witch or an alarmed car, in hopes that they’ll fire at you and set off the fun.

Boomer: The key class, as he produces the disorientation that makes other attacks devastating.  Tell your teammates where you’ll be attacking.  Always spawn at the last possible moment so they can’t pick you off from afar.  Try to spew on everyone– then go melee the ones you missed, in hopes that they’ll kill you, drenching themselves. 

Forest areas are difficult, but there are generally rocks or little cabins you can spawn behind; you just have to be a little more patient.

Even a four-survivor boom will do little damage if the horde can’t get at them– e.g.  if they’re ensconced in a subway car, or hiding in a room with just one exit.   (On the other hand, it slows them down and keeps them busy, so it’s not worthless.)

Hunter: Basic strategy: wait for a boom, preferably attacking one of the non-boomed survivors.  You get a bonus if you can pounce from a height.

Another basic strategy: Hunter or Smoker attacks survivor A; another hunter pounces whoever comes to rescue the victim.

Pay dirt comes when the survivors start to drift apart, even a little bit.  Get the isolated ones; this works even better if your teammates attack the rest of the survivors to keep them away.

If you’re shoved off a victim, you can often get in a melee attack or two before you’re killed.

Smoker: I’m worst at this myself, but it can be a game-changer, since it can break up a cohesive knot of survivors.  Try to smoke from a height, and always pull backwards (i.e., away from the direction they want to go).

Milling zombies will break your tongue, so it’s hard to smoke in the middle of a horde attack.

Single best smoker attack: pull someone from the roof in No Mercy 3.  (Either the person dies, or someone has to go rescue them, hopefully to be pounced by a hunter.)  Awesomest smoker attack: same level, pull them from the little room near the gas station, through the window, back into the alley they started from.

Tank: Avoid fire (which will kill you quickly) and open spaces (where the survivors can pour lead into you).  Hit trees, cars, and forklifts (fortunately, the game will aim these for you). 

Don’t obsess over any one survivor… hit whoever’s closest.  Use the throw attack if no one is very close; keep aiming throughout the throw. 

Tanks will normally scatter the survivors, making them excellent targets for the other infected.  The latters should attack from behind since the survivors should be paying attention to Mr. Tank.

The director wants you to keep attacking.  Don’t worry about that.  If the survivors set an area on fire, it’s better to give up control to a teammate rather than plunge in.

 

Ask Zompist: Monopolies

I’ve come across a claim by libertarians, ranging from Ayn Rand and Ron Paul to a slew of personal acquaintances, that monopolies and oligopolies are unsustainable without economic aid from the government.  Is there any truth to this claim?  What are the counter-examples?

—Ian

Whenever someone makes a claim like that, the burden of proof is on them.  Ask for three examples. (You can’t do this with an author, of course; but if they don’t provide examples, you don’t have to take their claim very seriously.)

See this old rant (and Josephson’s book) for some examples of Robber Baron monopolies.  What government aid benefitted the steel trust or Rockefeller’s oil refinery monopoly?  Is Microsoft’s near-monopoly on operating systems, or Google’s on search engines, subsidized by government?

The railroads are a special case, both supporting and undermining the libertarian position.  Many were frank giveaways of federal land.  But the railroad companies also blackmailed local governments and simply took over state governments.  Predatory tycoons will simply do as they please and bilk consumers and lesser companies in the absence of a strong government.

 

Ask Zompist: Improving the US Election Process

Since the election fever has died down a bit (and since the right guy won), I have a question about what I consider problems in the American election process.

[1] Election is always on  a workday (Tuesday), instead of Sunday, when most people don’t work, and therefore, more voters would be able to vote. The reason I’ve heard is that this tradition was established because of Christian fundamentalists, who interpreted the Sunday laws in such a way that no travel was allowed on Sunday, and since in the 18th century, it would often have taken a long horse ride or walk to the next town, so Monday was also skipped to be on the safe side, and Tuesday agreed as election day. The reason why it’s still done today, when travel is much faster than in the past, and when the US is officially secular (and therefore, should not cater to some religious group’s wishes over other reasons) is either the inertia of tradition, or to keep normal workers from voting. (Although I think that’s a bit too cynically exaggerated.)

Do you think that a Democratic President (and a Democratic majority) will change that, to a Sunday, or is tradition too holy for Americans?  Or has the problem become moot because in this election those voters who didn’t have the time during Tuesday itself queued up beforehand at post offices and other places to vote by letter?

[2] Then there’s the problem of the Electoral votes. As far as I can guess, the most likeliest reason for this complication is because of not efficient communication and travel system at the founders time, so having each state elect Electors, who then had to travel to the college, was the best logistic option. But today, with instantenous communication and quick counting of results, I don’t see an advantage of the Electoral approach over a direct one: why not count all popular votes across states for a grand total, instead of throwing away one half in each state because winner takes all majority principle? Is it again the case that inertia of tradtion and reverence for the founders is stronger than a practical look at what system would work best? The pragmatic approach to problems is usually – in technologial areas for example – what the Americans pride themselves on, when compared to other nations with strong traditions, but in the field of politics, it seems that tradtion is the!
only reason?

[3] The recent problems (though I haven’t heard as much an uproar about it as 4 years before – are people getting used to massive cheating? That would be a bad sign for democracy, I think) are that electronic voting machines are too insecure and open to fraud ; and that people are crossed off the voters list too easily, for example if their name is similar to that of a felon (that prison inmates are being denied their civil right to vote is another problem). Both have been proven to happen by journalists who were worried that the Democrats were not taking enough steps to stop this, both on local level by challenging the removal of voters, and on federal level by removing electronic voting machines as long as they are that insecure. Will this, too, change now with a Democrat in power, or will they stop worrying because they won despite hindrances?

[4] Shouldn’t more people – both correct politicans and citizens – worry about the democratic process and attitude in society if not only the percentage of people who actually vote is only about 50% and that many of those who try to vote are disenfranchised? I don’t think that the attitude of “It’s only several thousand votes who got lost/were falsly attributed/couldn’t vote, that wouldn’t decide the election because the margin was bigger” is a good attitude.

–Constanze

Better get a coffee, this might take a bit.

I’ve mentioned voting systems before, here and here, and talked here about how Americans are curiously reluctant to modify their governmental structures.  It’s harder to explain why that is; “tradition” rarely stops us in other areas.  At root it may be that the US, unlike European nation-states, defines itself by its ideology, not by ethnicity.  You’re an American if you accept the American way of doing things, which includes our approach to government.  So it’s not lightly changed.

On [1], voting day, your historical account is true I believe.  It’s just not an issue in American politics, though, so it’s not likely to change.  In the states I checked, employers are required to give time off for voting. I’m not sure that weekend voting would be popular anyway— people use the weekend for errands or entertainment. And you’re right that early voting is more and more popular— as much as 1/4 of votes last election.

On [2], I think most people realize that the Electoral College is foolish, especially after the 2000 election which showed that the popular vote winner losing wasn’t just theoretical.

But even a bad system has its beneficiaries.  The Electoral College magnifies the power of small states… every state that has 1 vote in the House of Representatives has 3 in the Electoral College.  And pretty much all such states currently vote Republican, while most of the largest states vote Democratic.  For that reason it’d be hard to get a change passed.  (Constitutional amendments require 2/3 approval in Congress, then ratification by 3/4 of the states.)

As for [3]— I really can’t explain why voting hasn’t been improved.  Often there are mean little political calculations involved— e.g. the Republicans have created a mythical “voter fraud” bugaboo and use it to try to restrain minority or elderly voting.  But it sure seems like voting is a technical problem that just shouldn’t be that hard to figure out.

Voter turnout [4] was 62%, which is pretty good for recent decades.  I’m reluctant to say more, because I think we need research, not speculation, on why people don’t vote.  If we don’t know, we’re likely to propose the wrong solutions.  E.g. if people just don’t care who wins, or are satisfied with either party, easier registration doesn’t help; if it’s the inconvenience, then it does.

 

Ask Zompist: Salting the economists

What do you think— with how much, or how little, salt should we take things said by Paul Krugman (and other economists)? On the one hand, he seems to be smart and insightful; on the other hand, he seems to assume certain things (like the IMF model of development, Ricardo’s trade prescriptions, and the seesaw model of inflation and unemployment) as self-evidently true and right even though there are various reasons (some of them covered by you) to have doubts about them. So, where do you agree with him and where do you disagree with him, and why? And what do you think how economics, as a field, is likely to develop in the near future (keeping in mind that this might well be different from how you might think it should develop)?

—Raphael

I don’t think Krugman in particular supports the neoliberal IMF model.  He’s an unrepentant Keynesian, after all— at the moment, for instance, he’s advocating a huge stimulus plan and actually worried that Obama won’t make it big enough.  That’s the opposite approach to the ‘austerity programs’ that the IMF imposes on developing nations.  Similarly, I remember him advocating currency controls during the 1990s troubles in southeast Asia.

A layman should be cautious, but not over-cautious, when disagreeing with experts.  Mere ignorance isn’t very attractive, and to be sure where the experts are not is a sign of quackery.

Where we can criticize the economists is in the assumptions they make about the world, intended to be simplifying, and arguably distorting instead.  An obvious one (now questioned by many economists) is the rationality of economic actors.  In many areas people simply don’t behave with a cold-blooded eye to their financial advantage.  Sometimes they’re simply valuing things other than money (e.g. prestige or conformism or fair play); sometimes they’re just dumb (e.g. the persistence of racism, which shrinks the market and discards good workers).

Thinking about money and incentives can produce a healthy cynicism— I like Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist for this.  Harford obviously spends too much time in coffeeshops, and he answers interesting questions like “Why do cafés cluster together?” and “Why are consumers willing to spend so much on coffee these days?”  On the other hand, there’s Joel Spolsky’s observation that incentives are counter-productive in management: you get more of what you measure, but rarely in a way that benefits the business.  The workers always learn to game the system, and more direly, their intrinsic motivation (doing a good job) is eroded by the extrinsic one (bonuses and incentives).  Economists helped produce highly inflated compensation for executives; in theory this was supposed to motivate them better, but with the failure of two major industries (investment banking and automobiles), it’s hard to see it as anything but dangerous looting.

Another issue, again recognized by good economists, is externalities.  The market doesn’t properly value non-production costs (e.g. pollution, or the despotism of oil-producing regimes) or long-term ones (e.g. mine cleanup or resource exhaustion or bubbles bursting).

The expert to really distrust is the one who never says “I don’t know.”  In retrospect, Greenspan’s air of authority, which so cowed even Democratic legislators, proved to cover an out-of-touch ideology more than any actual sagacity.

 

Ask Zompist: Feline-descended humans

In Almea, hominids don’t originate from primates but from an amphibian ancestry… So, I was wondering if it was possible to imagine human-like aliens descending from feline-like aliens.

—Opera

Oh dear, you want to create furries, don’t you?  Well, you certainly can imagine it… it’s common enough in sf/fantasy.  Though why does everyone pick cats, wolves, and foxes?  Capybaras, bonobos, wallabies, and platypuses could use more love.

Or do you mean, can you do it plausibly?  That depends on whether you’re writing fantasy or sf.  In fantasy, humanoids are the norm and need no justification.  Fantasy is more about the sense of wonder, or even spiritual or metaphysical exploration; it’s not hung up about biology.

Lots of sf is fantasy-with-phasers; but in theory sf is supposed to be scientific, and there’s little excuse for humanoids— except for the low budgets of TV shows.  Looking around our planet, it’s striking how varied are the animals even within one particular niche— among medium-large herbivores, for instance, we find deer, ostriches, and kangaroos.  Intelligent species should show at least that amount of variety.  The humanoid form, with its long thin limbs, derives from primate brachiation; a species that never lived in the trees shouldn’t look like us.  (And other common attributes of sf humanoids, such as breasts and lack of body hair, aren’t even shared with the other great apes.) 

Think about behavior, too… primates are intensely social creatures, and that was probably the engine for the development of our intelligence, such as it is.  A mostly solitary animal like a cat isn’t likely to go that route.  Lions might work better.  I also suspect that it’s not coincidence that we’re omnivores.  Omnivores have to be more adaptable… also more active; both characteristics could also facilitate intelligence.