Fair enough. I certainly didn’t try to mince words. My goal was to violently shave off any idea of “agency” my friend was giving to evolution. He was walking around satisfied with his explanation that evolution selects for the fittest and is therefore optimizing for the fittest.[1] The point of the dialogue format was to point out that you can call it an optimization process, but when you taboo that word you figure out it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what is being optimized for. If you’re going to call something an optimization process, you’d better tell me exactly what is being optimized for. If you can’t, you are probably using that word as a curiosity stopper or something.
I think we’ll be able to pinpoint what evolution optimizes for, someday. [2] Gravity as a force optimizes for the creation of stars: enough so that loose clouds of hydrogen are pretty much guaranteed to form stars. You could say “gravity optimizes for the creation of stars from hydrogen clouds” and anticipate experience with seamless accuracy. Evolution is like this except it’s so much more complex that in order to explain it as an optimization process you’ll have to resort to the dreaded word “emergence”.
I think there’s also something to be said about reminding people from time to time that “optimization pressure” and “emergence” and are in the map, not the territory; the territory is a different beast. I think you could reasonably take on the “true” way of seeing things for an hour or two after reading this post, and then go back to your business believing in the heuristic that evolution is an optimization process (once you’ve finished with your partial transfiguration).
In fact, most of the work has probably been done by Dawkins and others and there’s a mountain of math out there that explains exactly what evolution is optimizing for. If that’s the case, I definitely want to understand it someday, and find all of this very exciting. But neither I nor my friend are in a position to explain what evolution is optimizing toward, at least in a way that would let us accurately anticipate experience.
Fair enough. I certainly didn’t try to mince words. My goal was to violently shave off any idea of “agency” my friend was giving to evolution. He was walking around satisfied with his explanation that evolution selects for the fittest and is therefore optimizing for the fittest.[1] The point of the dialogue format was to point out that you can call it an optimization process, but when you taboo that word you figure out it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what is being optimized for. If you’re going to call something an optimization process, you’d better tell me exactly what is being optimized for. If you can’t, you are probably using that word as a curiosity stopper or something.
I think we’ll be able to pinpoint what evolution optimizes for, someday. [2] Gravity as a force optimizes for the creation of stars: enough so that loose clouds of hydrogen are pretty much guaranteed to form stars. You could say “gravity optimizes for the creation of stars from hydrogen clouds” and anticipate experience with seamless accuracy. Evolution is like this except it’s so much more complex that in order to explain it as an optimization process you’ll have to resort to the dreaded word “emergence”.
I think there’s also something to be said about reminding people from time to time that “optimization pressure” and “emergence” and are in the map, not the territory; the territory is a different beast. I think you could reasonably take on the “true” way of seeing things for an hour or two after reading this post, and then go back to your business believing in the heuristic that evolution is an optimization process (once you’ve finished with your partial transfiguration).
Note the verb “optimized”, which implies that something active is going on.
In fact, most of the work has probably been done by Dawkins and others and there’s a mountain of math out there that explains exactly what evolution is optimizing for. If that’s the case, I definitely want to understand it someday, and find all of this very exciting. But neither I nor my friend are in a position to explain what evolution is optimizing toward, at least in a way that would let us accurately anticipate experience.