I think you are making the same sort of error here that you frequently admonish us against. In particular it seems to me that your argument here is tacitly assuming that somehow the experience of imagining is necessery to efficently predict the future. As you yourself have pointed out we shouldn’t ascribe our own ends and desires to the genes that ‘act’ through us. Thus the fact that we propogate our genes by explicit verbal reasoning and imagination doesn’t give us any particular reason to believe that our genetic computers are any more predictively accurate than those of other animals.
I mean suppose you asked the best and brightest geneticists and computer scientists to design a set of genes (starting from scratch) that would best enable the organism containing them to quickly and accurately adapt to new circumstances. Do you really think we could do better than the genome of a fish? If not then in what sense isn’t it true that the genome of a fish is a more efficient calculating device for how to respond to the environment?
I think you are making the same sort of error here that you frequently admonish us against. In particular it seems to me that your argument here is tacitly assuming that somehow the experience of imagining is necessery to efficently predict the future. As you yourself have pointed out we shouldn’t ascribe our own ends and desires to the genes that ‘act’ through us. Thus the fact that we propogate our genes by explicit verbal reasoning and imagination doesn’t give us any particular reason to believe that our genetic computers are any more predictively accurate than those of other animals.
I mean suppose you asked the best and brightest geneticists and computer scientists to design a set of genes (starting from scratch) that would best enable the organism containing them to quickly and accurately adapt to new circumstances. Do you really think we could do better than the genome of a fish? If not then in what sense isn’t it true that the genome of a fish is a more efficient calculating device for how to respond to the environment?