I feel like there’s confusion in this post between group-level survival and individual-level fitness but I don’t want to try to investigate that now.
Yes. This is just group selectionism rephrased as ‘existence’.
So what did natural selection want for us? What were we selected for? Existence.
No, natural selection did not want that for us, and we were not selected for that. Natural selection selects for relative fitness, and will happily select for individuals which are driving their group to extinction, as long as they increase their relative share of the remaining group. Eliezer already covered this: there is no Frodo gene. There is no term in the Price equation defining replicator dynamics which rewards ‘total existence’. (Relative fitness tends to try to maintain absolute existence… but only somewhat, hence the need for inclusive fitness to explain self-sacrifice and other existence-terminating effects.)
Energy is the Noether theorem conserved thing for time-translation.
Eigenstates do not care about atom boundaries.
With biological evolution we might be limited to an alphabeth of some kind of combination of carbon chemistry. But time evolution does not care what its tokens are.
Yes. This is just group selectionism rephrased as ‘existence’.
No, natural selection did not want that for us, and we were not selected for that. Natural selection selects for relative fitness, and will happily select for individuals which are driving their group to extinction, as long as they increase their relative share of the remaining group. Eliezer already covered this: there is no Frodo gene. There is no term in the Price equation defining replicator dynamics which rewards ‘total existence’. (Relative fitness tends to try to maintain absolute existence… but only somewhat, hence the need for inclusive fitness to explain self-sacrifice and other existence-terminating effects.)
Energy is the Noether theorem conserved thing for time-translation.
Eigenstates do not care about atom boundaries.
With biological evolution we might be limited to an alphabeth of some kind of combination of carbon chemistry. But time evolution does not care what its tokens are.