Before proceding let me first point out I don’t consider happiness in itself to be a goal for me. Happiness in some quantitify is simply a nesecary condition of following my goals optimaly… I have relationships only with women who I see as potentially good mothers and carrying good genes.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you’ve done an affective death spiral around evolution (please note—it is possible to have an ADS around a true idea!)
Evolution by natural selection is a convenient description of the mere statistical phenomenon that genes which code for traits beneficial to themselves, tend to live to the next generation. It has exactly the same “goals” as, say, Regression toward the mean—i.e., zero.
You do not have to do what evolution “wants” (as one might say in anthropomorphic shorthand), although your values do bear the stamp of this wild and wacky algorithm.
Perhaps the desires you express above are really your desires, but I am suspicious that they actually represent what you think you should desire “rationally,” based on the mistaken idea that maximizing inclusive genetic fitness is some kind of moral imperative. It’s not! Your values are pre-rational—you don’t need to justify them to anyone, least of all to an anthropomorphization of gene frequency fluctuations.
That being said, do you seriously find this reproductive strategy optimal, in a short and long-term sense? Optimal for what?
I don’t consider it optimal. I consider it better than the average lifescrpit in maximizing the total of interesting things “parts” of me (or should I say my descendants) learn.
More of them + as smart as possible + valuing similar stuff to myself
Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you’ve done an affective death spiral around evolution (please note—it is possible to have an ADS around a true idea!)
Evolution by natural selection is a convenient description of the mere statistical phenomenon that genes which code for traits beneficial to themselves, tend to live to the next generation. It has exactly the same “goals” as, say, Regression toward the mean—i.e., zero.
You do not have to do what evolution “wants” (as one might say in anthropomorphic shorthand), although your values do bear the stamp of this wild and wacky algorithm.
Perhaps the desires you express above are really your desires, but I am suspicious that they actually represent what you think you should desire “rationally,” based on the mistaken idea that maximizing inclusive genetic fitness is some kind of moral imperative. It’s not! Your values are pre-rational—you don’t need to justify them to anyone, least of all to an anthropomorphization of gene frequency fluctuations.
That being said, do you seriously find this reproductive strategy optimal, in a short and long-term sense? Optimal for what?
I don’t consider it optimal. I consider it better than the average lifescrpit in maximizing the total of interesting things “parts” of me (or should I say my descendants) learn.
More of them + as smart as possible + valuing similar stuff to myself