Acausal sexual reproduction is quite plausible, in a sense. Suppose you were a single woman living in a society with access to sophisticated genetic engineering, and you wanted to give birth to a child that was biologically yours and not do any unnatural optimizing. You could envision your ideal mate in detail, reverse-engineer the genetics of this man, and then create a sperm population that the man could have produced had he existed. I can easily imagine a genetic engineer offering this service: you walk into the office, describe the man’s physical attributes, personality, and even life history, and the engineer does the rest as much as is possible (in this society, we know that a plurality of men who played shortstop in Little League have a certain allele, etc.) The child could grow up and meaningfully learn things about the counterfactual father—if you learned that the father was prone to depression, that would mean that you should watch out for that as well.
If the mother really wants to, she can take things further and specify that the man should be the kind of person who would have, had he existed, gone through the analogous procedure (with a surrogate or artificial womb), and that the counterfactual woman he would have specified would have been her. In this case, we can say that the man and the woman have acausally reproduced.
Hmm. So the man has managed to “acausally reproduce”, fulfill his utility function, in spite of not existing. You could go further and posit an imaginary couple who would have chosen each other for the procedure—so they succeed in “acausally reproducing”, even though neither of them exists. Then when someone tries to write a story about the imaginary couple, the child becomes observable to the writer and starts doing some reproducing of her own :-)
I meant it in the sense of ata’s parent comment, although there is a backwards arrow in there: the phenotype is determining the genotype rather than vice versa.
Acausal sexual reproduction is quite plausible, in a sense. Suppose you were a single woman living in a society with access to sophisticated genetic engineering, and you wanted to give birth to a child that was biologically yours and not do any unnatural optimizing. You could envision your ideal mate in detail, reverse-engineer the genetics of this man, and then create a sperm population that the man could have produced had he existed. I can easily imagine a genetic engineer offering this service: you walk into the office, describe the man’s physical attributes, personality, and even life history, and the engineer does the rest as much as is possible (in this society, we know that a plurality of men who played shortstop in Little League have a certain allele, etc.) The child could grow up and meaningfully learn things about the counterfactual father—if you learned that the father was prone to depression, that would mean that you should watch out for that as well.
If the mother really wants to, she can take things further and specify that the man should be the kind of person who would have, had he existed, gone through the analogous procedure (with a surrogate or artificial womb), and that the counterfactual woman he would have specified would have been her. In this case, we can say that the man and the woman have acausally reproduced.
Hmm. So the man has managed to “acausally reproduce”, fulfill his utility function, in spite of not existing. You could go further and posit an imaginary couple who would have chosen each other for the procedure—so they succeed in “acausally reproducing”, even though neither of them exists. Then when someone tries to write a story about the imaginary couple, the child becomes observable to the writer and starts doing some reproducing of her own :-)
My interpretation of acausal sexual reproduction would be something more like All You Zombies.
What makes this acausal? That is, when are future inputs modifying present results? Or are you using a different definition of acausal?
I meant it in the sense of ata’s parent comment, although there is a backwards arrow in there: the phenotype is determining the genotype rather than vice versa.