What is the purpose of declaring some organism the “winner” of evolution? This is like looking at a vast river delta and declaring one of its many streams to be the “most successful” at finding the sea. Any such judgement is epiphenomenal to the thing itself, which does not care about the stories anyone makes up about it.
Some people say that e.g. inner alignment failed for evolution in creating humans. In order for that claim of historical alignment difficulty to cash out, it feels like humans need to be “winners” of evolution in some sense, as otherwise species that don’t achieve as full agency as humans do seem like a plausibly more relevant comparison to look at. This is kind of a partial post, playing with the idea but not really deciding anything definitive.
What is the purpose of declaring some organism the “winner” of evolution? This is like looking at a vast river delta and declaring one of its many streams to be the “most successful” at finding the sea. Any such judgement is epiphenomenal to the thing itself, which does not care about the stories anyone makes up about it.
Some people say that e.g. inner alignment failed for evolution in creating humans. In order for that claim of historical alignment difficulty to cash out, it feels like humans need to be “winners” of evolution in some sense, as otherwise species that don’t achieve as full agency as humans do seem like a plausibly more relevant comparison to look at. This is kind of a partial post, playing with the idea but not really deciding anything definitive.