= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
SforSingularity comments on Bloggingheads: Robert Wright and Eliezer Yudkowsky - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (127)
I was on Robert Wright's side towards the end of this debate when he claimed that there was a higher optimization process that created natural selection for a purpose.
The purpose of natural selection, fine-tuning of physical constants in our universe, and of countless other detailed coincidences (1) was to create me. (Or, for the readers of this comment, to create you)
The optimization process that optimized all these things is called anthropics. Its principle of operation is absurdly simple: you can't find yourself in a part of the universe that can't create you.
When Robert Wright looks at evolution and sees purpose in the existence of the process of evolution itself (and the particular way it happened to play out, including increasing complexity), he is seeing the evidence for anthropics and big worlds.
Once you take away all the meta-purpose that is caused by anthropics, then I really do think there is no more purpose left. Eli should re-do the debate with this insight on the table.
(note 1) (including that evolution on earth happened to create intelligence, which seems to be a highly unlikley outcome of a generic biochemical replicator process on a generic planet; we know this because earth managed to have life for 4 billion years -- half of its total viability as a place for life -- without intelligence emerging, and said intelligence seemed to depend in an essential way on a random asteroid impact at approximately the right moment )
I don't think this is much of an insight, to be honest. The "anthropic" interpretation is a statement that the universe requires self-consistency. Which is, let's say, not surprising.
My feeling is that this is a statement about the English language. This is not a statement about the universe.
That's not what "purpose" means.
The discussion is about what "purpose" means - in the context of designoid systems.
I for one am fine with attributing "purpose" to designoid entities that were created by an anthropic selective process - rather than by evolution and natural selection.
I guess I can see that.
There's also the possibility of "the adapted universe" idea - as laid out by Lee Smolin in "The Life of the Cosmos" and James Gardner in "Biocosm" and "Intelligent-Universe".
Those ideas may face some Occam pruning - but they seem reasonably sensible. The laws of the universe show signs of being a complex adaptive system - and anthropic selection is not the only possible kind of selection effect that could be responsible for that. There could fairly easily be more to it than anthropic selection.
Then there's Simulism...
I go into the various possibilites in my "Viable Intelligent Design Hypotheses" essay:
http://originoflife.net/intelligent_design/
Robert Wright has produced a broadly similar analysis elsewhere.