Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Aiming at the Target - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 October 2008 04:47PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 October 2008 07:47:50PM 4 points [-]

Kenny, compared to cumulative processes like natural selection that mutate and select over and over - let alone human intelligence that navigates a compressed search space - to select one star cloud out of a million possibles is only 20 bits of information at most. And considering the variance between star clouds, that 20 bits of information won't go very far. You can't expect to find complex functionally optimized machinery within stars on the order of what exists in the smallest bacterium. If evolution has not gotten started anywhere else in the galaxy, then I fully expect that the rest of the entire Milky Way contains less interesting complexity than one Earth butterfly.

See e.g. "No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices".