As many comments have suggested, now that evolution has produced creatures that can consciously seek goals, and also has instilled in some of these creatures, to some extent, the goal of bearing and raising children, all that evolution needs to do is to reinforce this desire, and in time it will manage to produce a conscious fitness maximizer.
Abandoning biology is not a way to avoid this result, since biology is not the problem, but reproduction and its historical consequences. Leaving behind biology could even speed up the process dramatically.
Maybe the alien god, despite being blind, slow, and stupid, will get its way in the end. In the distant future, intelligent fitness maximizers might laugh at the ridiculous idea, now long extinct, that it is better to have a random collection of unrelated desires for no reason except historical accident, than to seek the unified goal of fitness. After all, they’ll say, obviously nothing is worth seeking except fitness. And besides, seeking anything else is self-destructive.
If this comes to pass, what would be wrong with it? If the wrongness is only from our point of view, why should our point of view have more validity than theirs? Since we have reason to think they would be find their goal boring or miserable, we have no obvious reason to be horrified at the idea of this society.
As many comments have suggested, now that evolution has produced creatures that can consciously seek goals, and also has instilled in some of these creatures, to some extent, the goal of bearing and raising children, all that evolution needs to do is to reinforce this desire, and in time it will manage to produce a conscious fitness maximizer.
Abandoning biology is not a way to avoid this result, since biology is not the problem, but reproduction and its historical consequences. Leaving behind biology could even speed up the process dramatically.
Maybe the alien god, despite being blind, slow, and stupid, will get its way in the end. In the distant future, intelligent fitness maximizers might laugh at the ridiculous idea, now long extinct, that it is better to have a random collection of unrelated desires for no reason except historical accident, than to seek the unified goal of fitness. After all, they’ll say, obviously nothing is worth seeking except fitness. And besides, seeking anything else is self-destructive.
If this comes to pass, what would be wrong with it? If the wrongness is only from our point of view, why should our point of view have more validity than theirs? Since we have reason to think they would be find their goal boring or miserable, we have no obvious reason to be horrified at the idea of this society.
It’s wrong because our function is different. Functions is wrong or true only for other functions.