Thanks Roger, I agree with you, although I also think we should be careful not to overstate the optimising power of either evolution or reinforcement learning. These are optimising processes to be sure but evolution certainly isn’t very good at finding absolute optimums and regularly seems to allow highly suboptimal solutions to problems as ‘good enough’. RL is probably a lot better but still imperfect. So I agree that some degree of, say, goal directness is likely to emerge from these processes but it may remain imperfect even if they were left to run for a very long time, especially if any of the goal, the system’s basic substrate, or its environment were sufficiently complex to begin with.
Thanks Roger, I agree with you, although I also think we should be careful not to overstate the optimising power of either evolution or reinforcement learning. These are optimising processes to be sure but evolution certainly isn’t very good at finding absolute optimums and regularly seems to allow highly suboptimal solutions to problems as ‘good enough’. RL is probably a lot better but still imperfect. So I agree that some degree of, say, goal directness is likely to emerge from these processes but it may remain imperfect even if they were left to run for a very long time, especially if any of the goal, the system’s basic substrate, or its environment were sufficiently complex to begin with.