It doesn’t matter evolution doesn’t have goals. Gradient descent also doesn’t have goals—it merely performs the optimization. Humans that kicked gradient descent off are analogous to a hypothetical alien that seeded Earth with the first replicator 4 billion years ago—it’s not relevant.
You say that it’s the phenotype that matters, not the genes. That’s not established, but let’s say it’s true. We nevertheless evolved a lot of heuristics that (sort of) result in duplicating our phenotype in the ancestral environment. We don’t care about it as a terminal value, and instead we care about very, very, very many other things.
It doesn’t matter evolution doesn’t have goals. Gradient descent also doesn’t have goals—it merely performs the optimization. Humans that kicked gradient descent off are analogous to a hypothetical alien that seeded Earth with the first replicator 4 billion years ago—it’s not relevant.
You say that it’s the phenotype that matters, not the genes. That’s not established, but let’s say it’s true. We nevertheless evolved a lot of heuristics that (sort of) result in duplicating our phenotype in the ancestral environment. We don’t care about it as a terminal value, and instead we care about very, very, very many other things.