Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided - Less Wrong

102 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 March 2007 06:53PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 March 2007 06:29:23PM 7 points [-]

Sorry, Brayton. I do know better, it was simply an accident of phrasing. I hadn't meant to imply that abiogenesis itself occurred by selective processes - "arose" was meant to refer to life's ascent rather than sparking.

Though, in my opinion, the very first replicator (or chemical catalytic hypercycle) should not really count as "life", because it merely happens to have the accidental property of self-replication and was not selectively optimized to this function. Thus, it properly belongs to the regime of accidental events rather than the regime of (natural) optimization.