I think the the self-reflective part of evolution brought us the revelation of suffering to our understandings. The self-unaware computations simply operate on pain as a carrot/stick system as they were initially evolved to function as. Most of the laws of civilization is about reducing suffering in the populations. Such realization in evolution has introduced new concepts regarding the relationship between ourselves as an individual self-contained computation and these smaller chunks of functions/computations that exist within us. Because of the carrot/stick functionality, by minimizing suffering, we also achieve what the function was originally designed to do, to help us with our self-preservation. This is the first level of the self-referential loop.
In the second loop, we can now see that this type of harm reduction is mainly geared toward the preservation of our own genes as we owe our knowledge to the people who have found out about multicellular organism and genetic makeup of living things. We can then again reflect on this loop to see whether we should do anything different given our new knowledge.
I think the the self-reflective part of evolution brought us the revelation of suffering to our understandings. The self-unaware computations simply operate on pain as a carrot/stick system as they were initially evolved to function as. Most of the laws of civilization is about reducing suffering in the populations. Such realization in evolution has introduced new concepts regarding the relationship between ourselves as an individual self-contained computation and these smaller chunks of functions/computations that exist within us. Because of the carrot/stick functionality, by minimizing suffering, we also achieve what the function was originally designed to do, to help us with our self-preservation. This is the first level of the self-referential loop.
In the second loop, we can now see that this type of harm reduction is mainly geared toward the preservation of our own genes as we owe our knowledge to the people who have found out about multicellular organism and genetic makeup of living things. We can then again reflect on this loop to see whether we should do anything different given our new knowledge.