Yeah, that’s the main counterargument. Evolution is purposeless and doesn’t care about anything for specific species or nature itself, and evolution isn’t telelogical, so Argument 5 fails.
evolution isn’t exactly purposeless; it has very little purpose, but to the degree a purpose could be described, the purpose for which things evolve is to survive in competition. that’s more than nothing. the search process is mutation, and the selection process is <anything that survives>. inferring additional constraints that this purpose implies seems potentially fruitful; non-local optimizers like ourselves can look at that objective and design constraints that unilaterally increase durability. our ability to reason over game theory means we’re not constrained to only evolutionary game theory; for example, we can make tit-for-tat-with-forgiveness more durable by noticing that it has a tendency to be replaced with cooperation when society is cooperative, and we can reintroduce tit-for-tat-with-forgiveness into contexts where cooperatebot-style reasoning has taken over.
Yeah, that’s the main counterargument. Evolution is purposeless and doesn’t care about anything for specific species or nature itself, and evolution isn’t telelogical, so Argument 5 fails.
evolution isn’t exactly purposeless; it has very little purpose, but to the degree a purpose could be described, the purpose for which things evolve is to survive in competition. that’s more than nothing. the search process is mutation, and the selection process is <anything that survives>. inferring additional constraints that this purpose implies seems potentially fruitful; non-local optimizers like ourselves can look at that objective and design constraints that unilaterally increase durability. our ability to reason over game theory means we’re not constrained to only evolutionary game theory; for example, we can make tit-for-tat-with-forgiveness more durable by noticing that it has a tendency to be replaced with cooperation when society is cooperative, and we can reintroduce tit-for-tat-with-forgiveness into contexts where cooperatebot-style reasoning has taken over.