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pjeby comments on Bloggingheads: Robert Wright and Eliezer Yudkowsky - Less Wrong
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Evolution is an optimization process, but it doesn't have "purpose" - it simply has byproducts that appear purposeful to humans.
Really, most of your comment just helps illustrate my point that purposefulness is a label attached by the observer: your knowledge (or lack thereof) of Martians is not something that changes the nature of the rock pattern itself, not even if you observe the Martian placing the rocks.
(In fact, your intiial estimate of whether the Martian's behavior is purposeful is going to depend largely on a bunch of hardwired sensory heuristics. If the Martian moves a lot slower than typical Earth wildlife, for example, you're less likely to notice it as a candidate for purposeful behavior in the first place.)
How do you know it doesn't have purpose? Because you know how it works, and you know that nothing like "Make intelligent life." was contained in it's initial state in the way it could be contained in a Martian brain or an AI.
The dumb mating martian also did not leave the rocks with any (intuitively labeled) purpose.
I'm saying: Given a high knowledge of the actual process behind something, we can take a measure that can useful, and corresponds well to what we label intentionality.
In turn, if we have only the aftermath of a process as evidence, we may be able to identify features which correspond to a certain degree of intentionality, and that might help us infer specifics of the process.
What Wright said in response to that claim was: how do you know that?
"Optimisationverse
The idea that the world is an optimisation algorithm is rather like Simulism - in that it postulates that the world exists inside a computer.
However, the purpose of an optimisationverse is not entertainment - rather it is to solve some optimisation problem using a genetic algorithm.
The genetic algorithm is a sophisticated one, that evolves its own recombination operators, discoveres engineering design - and so on."
In this scenario, the process of evolution we witness does have a purpose - it was set up deliberately to help solve an optimisation problem. Surely this is not a p=0 case...
That's not the same thing as acting purposefully -- which evolution would still not be doing in that case.
(I assume that we at least agree that for something to act purposefully, it must contain some form of representation of the goal to be obtained -- a thermostat at least meets that requirement, while evolution does not... even if evolution was as intentionally designed and purposefully created as the thermostat.)
My purposeful thinking evolved into a punny story:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2kf/purposefulness_on_mars/
It would have a purpose in my proposed first sense - and in my proposed second sense - if we are talking about the evolutionary process after the evolution of forward-looking brains.
Evolution (or the biosphere) was what was being argued about in the video. The claim was that it didn't behave in a goal directed manner - because of its internal conflicts. The idea that lack of harmony could mess up goal-directedness seems OK to me.
One issue of whether the biosphere has enough harmony for a goal-directed model to be useful. If it has a single global brain, and can do things like pool resources to knock out incoming meteorites, it seems obvious that a goal-directed model is actually useful in predicting the behaviour of the overall system.