to say nothing of a whole multicellular C. elegans earthworm
It would probably better if you had said nothing of it. It eats dead rotting vegetable matter, which you have just hypothetically removed. Plants are replicators too! So it would die in short order and time would be reversed.
But the significant thing was not how much material was recruited into the world of replication; the significant thing was the search, and the material just carried out that search.
Search is significant, but it was not the only significant thing. What was searched was also significant. If by chance a brain that searched the space of good chess strategies had spontaneously appeared, it would not be important. What was searched was “what patterns are good for survival to date”, not “what patterns that are expected to be good for survival”. This is important, it is real first hand information, we cannot exist because of some delusive part of natures mind that thinks we are good at surviving so far, we have to be!
Our existence is first order information about the world. Our mental models are only second order, they are one removed from reality. We try and update them by testing our reality against what the models predict, but there might always be black swans the models don’t see. The machinery that creates them has to have been useful for surviving to date and carrying out many tasks that helps that survival, but the models themselves do not necessarily have to be useful, right, correct or true. I think there will always be a flow of information from the first order bodies to the second order models.
Even a very small step forward in evolution, taken as a ‘short-cut’, would result in failure. - life changed the chemistry around it—headline is the relative abundance and influence of free oxygen relative to CO2.
The point is that the search is ALWAYS for near neighbour variants, and even then, the huge majority of these are failures.
The (seemingly) vastly improbable success of variants that are not near neighbours has, I think, to do with complexity and the concomitant law of unintended (in this context, ‘unwelcome’ would be a better word, since no intention is involved) consequences. The larger the step, the exponentially larger probability of corollary catastrophic implications.
It would probably better if you had said nothing of it. It eats dead rotting vegetable matter, which you have just hypothetically removed. Plants are replicators too! So it would die in short order and time would be reversed.
Search is significant, but it was not the only significant thing. What was searched was also significant. If by chance a brain that searched the space of good chess strategies had spontaneously appeared, it would not be important. What was searched was “what patterns are good for survival to date”, not “what patterns that are expected to be good for survival”. This is important, it is real first hand information, we cannot exist because of some delusive part of natures mind that thinks we are good at surviving so far, we have to be!
Our existence is first order information about the world. Our mental models are only second order, they are one removed from reality. We try and update them by testing our reality against what the models predict, but there might always be black swans the models don’t see. The machinery that creates them has to have been useful for surviving to date and carrying out many tasks that helps that survival, but the models themselves do not necessarily have to be useful, right, correct or true. I think there will always be a flow of information from the first order bodies to the second order models.
Even a very small step forward in evolution, taken as a ‘short-cut’, would result in failure. - life changed the chemistry around it—headline is the relative abundance and influence of free oxygen relative to CO2.
The point is that the search is ALWAYS for near neighbour variants, and even then, the huge majority of these are failures.
The (seemingly) vastly improbable success of variants that are not near neighbours has, I think, to do with complexity and the concomitant law of unintended (in this context, ‘unwelcome’ would be a better word, since no intention is involved) consequences. The larger the step, the exponentially larger probability of corollary catastrophic implications.