Comment on Uncategories and empty categories

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 22:35:31 GMT

The traits of evolved organisms are usually a reasonable approximation of fitness-maximizing, because they're the output of billions of years of a fitness-maximizing process; I'm with you on not being willing to call it "coincidence". But this seems silly:

Your cognitive algorithms, executed in a human body, maximize its inclusive genetic fitness.

My cognitive algorithms are the results of a process which maximizes inclusive genetic fitness. This does not mean these algorithms themselves maximize that.

On the margin, a large fraction of the outputs of this process definitely don't maximize fitness. Otherwise, there would be nothing for selection to eventually weed out!

Discuss