Eliezer: “It has something to do with natural selection never choosing a single act of mercy, of grace, even when it would cost its purpose nothing: not auto-anesthetizing a wounded and dying gazelle, when its pain no longer serves even the adaptive purpose that first created pain.”
It always costs something; it is cheaper to build a gazelle that always feels pain than one that does so until some conditions are met. This is the related to the case of supposing a spaceship that has passed out of your lightcone still exists.
Natural selection isn’t fair; it doesn’t compute fairness at all. This has nothing to do with the question whether there are situations where it could be fair to no cost, even if perhaps humans are more easily made aware of this fact if presented with cases where natural selection is outright unfair. Such cases very probably exists (ponder gene fixation) but to find them is nigh to impossible: you have to prove an absence of costs.
A sidenote:
Eliezer: “It has something to do with natural selection never choosing a single act of mercy, of grace, even when it would cost its purpose nothing: not auto-anesthetizing a wounded and dying gazelle, when its pain no longer serves even the adaptive purpose that first created pain.”
It always costs something; it is cheaper to build a gazelle that always feels pain than one that does so until some conditions are met. This is the related to the case of supposing a spaceship that has passed out of your lightcone still exists.
Natural selection isn’t fair; it doesn’t compute fairness at all. This has nothing to do with the question whether there are situations where it could be fair to no cost, even if perhaps humans are more easily made aware of this fact if presented with cases where natural selection is outright unfair. Such cases very probably exists (ponder gene fixation) but to find them is nigh to impossible: you have to prove an absence of costs.