What evolutionary algorithm, operating over a non-immense period of time, even comes close to what a talented human is capable of? It wasn't evolution that built your computer, although small parts of it (that humans are unusually bad at designing) may have been constructed by evolutionary algorithms.
Humans are also functions of reality, unless you're a dualist. We have imperfect models, but evolution doesn't have a model at all, which is why it's stupid. Even if it did inerrantly respond to the immediate environment (and it doesn't - look at the effect of a sense of taste adapted to a very different environment, for instance), it necessarily can't plan for the future. You really sound like you're genuflecting at a sacred mystery, not being rational.
Re specialness: it's annoying to smugly point out things that people are already perfectly aware of.
Comment author:Lipdorn_1
31 October 2012 03:14:10PM
-5 points
[-]
Think about it. Humans are the result of an evolutionary algorithm. Therefore it could be argued that a human being designing something is simply the original evolutionary algorithm finding a clever "short-cut".
Once humans create computers that self replicate and optimize and improve themselves...we would have simply become a milestone, a stepping point if you will, towards the the ultimate replicator. So yes, I could argue that it was evolution that built my computer.
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What evolutionary algorithm, operating over a non-immense period of time, even comes close to what a talented human is capable of? It wasn't evolution that built your computer, although small parts of it (that humans are unusually bad at designing) may have been constructed by evolutionary algorithms.
Humans are also functions of reality, unless you're a dualist. We have imperfect models, but evolution doesn't have a model at all, which is why it's stupid. Even if it did inerrantly respond to the immediate environment (and it doesn't - look at the effect of a sense of taste adapted to a very different environment, for instance), it necessarily can't plan for the future. You really sound like you're genuflecting at a sacred mystery, not being rational.
Re specialness: it's annoying to smugly point out things that people are already perfectly aware of.
Think about it. Humans are the result of an evolutionary algorithm. Therefore it could be argued that a human being designing something is simply the original evolutionary algorithm finding a clever "short-cut".
Once humans create computers that self replicate and optimize and improve themselves...we would have simply become a milestone, a stepping point if you will, towards the the ultimate replicator. So yes, I could argue that it was evolution that built my computer.