&gt; The number of local optima grows exponentially in problem dimension, so increasing the dimension simply provides an even stronger guarantee that your optimizer will converge to one.<p>Forgive my potential ignorance, but it seems to me that there&#x27;s a difference between the dimensionality of a problem and the dimensionality of a neural net working on the problem. Did you mean to imply that adding more dimensions to a neural net increases the number of local maxima for the problem?<p>&gt; Evolution, for its part, is definitely stuck in one, as evidenced by the fact that I cannot fly.<p>Flying requires a large number of biological tweaks that are not necessarily good for every organism. For instance, lower bone density. When humans have this, we call it osteoporosis and it&#x27;s generally a Bad Thing(tm).<p>Also, I could argue that evolution has done a better job than you give it credit for, considering that I don&#x27;t know any other animal that can travel over land at sustained high speeds, fly at extreme altitude, swim to extreme depths, and burrow through mountains.