I think what you say makes sense, but to be clear the argument does not consider those things as the optimisation target but rather considers fitness or reproductive capacity as the optimisation target. (A reasonable counterargument is that the analogy doesn’t hold up because fitness-as-optimisation-target isn’t a good way to characterise evolution as an optimiser.)
A reasonable counterargument is that the analogy doesn’t hold up because fitness-as-optimisation-target isn’t a good way to characterise evolution as an optimiser.
Yeah, that’s the main counterargument. Evolution is purposeless and doesn’t care about anything for specific species or nature itself, and evolution isn’t telelogical, so Argument 5 fails.
evolution isn’t exactly purposeless; it has very little purpose, but to the degree a purpose could be described, the purpose for which things evolve is to survive in competition. that’s more than nothing. the search process is mutation, and the selection process is <anything that survives>. inferring additional constraints that this purpose implies seems potentially fruitful; non-local optimizers like ourselves can look at that objective and design constraints that unilaterally increase durability. our ability to reason over game theory means we’re not constrained to only evolutionary game theory; for example, we can make tit-for-tat-with-forgiveness more durable by noticing that it has a tendency to be replaced with cooperation when society is cooperative, and we can reintroduce tit-for-tat-with-forgiveness into contexts where cooperatebot-style reasoning has taken over.
I think what you say makes sense, but to be clear the argument does not consider those things as the optimisation target but rather considers fitness or reproductive capacity as the optimisation target. (A reasonable counterargument is that the analogy doesn’t hold up because fitness-as-optimisation-target isn’t a good way to characterise evolution as an optimiser.)
Yes, that was my argument in the comment that I linked. :)
Yeah, that’s the main counterargument. Evolution is purposeless and doesn’t care about anything for specific species or nature itself, and evolution isn’t telelogical, so Argument 5 fails.
evolution isn’t exactly purposeless; it has very little purpose, but to the degree a purpose could be described, the purpose for which things evolve is to survive in competition. that’s more than nothing. the search process is mutation, and the selection process is <anything that survives>. inferring additional constraints that this purpose implies seems potentially fruitful; non-local optimizers like ourselves can look at that objective and design constraints that unilaterally increase durability. our ability to reason over game theory means we’re not constrained to only evolutionary game theory; for example, we can make tit-for-tat-with-forgiveness more durable by noticing that it has a tendency to be replaced with cooperation when society is cooperative, and we can reintroduce tit-for-tat-with-forgiveness into contexts where cooperatebot-style reasoning has taken over.