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timtyler 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.)
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.