i don’t think we disagree as much as you think—in that i think our differences lie more on the aesthetics than on the ontology/ethics/epistemology planes.
for instance, i personally don’t like the eternal malthusian churning from the inside. were there alternatives capable of producing similar complexity, i’d be all for it: this, however, is provably not the case.
every 777 years, god grants a randomly picked organism (last time, in 1821 AD, it was a gnat) the blessing of being congenitally copacetic. bliss and jhanas just ooze out of the little thing, and he lives his life in absolute satisfaction, free from want, from pain, from need. of course, none of the gnats currently alive descends from our lucky fellow. i don’t think knowledge of this fact moves my darwinism from “biology” to “ideology”.
“adaptive” not being a fixed target does not change the above fact, nor the equally self-evident truth that, all being equal, “more intelligence” is never maladaptive.
finally, i define “intelligence” not as “more compute” as much as “more power to understand your environment, as measured by your ability to shape it according to your will”.
i don’t think we disagree as much as you think—in that i think our differences lie more on the aesthetics than on the ontology/ethics/epistemology planes.
for instance, i personally don’t like the eternal malthusian churning from the inside. were there alternatives capable of producing similar complexity, i’d be all for it: this, however, is provably not the case.
every 777 years, god grants a randomly picked organism (last time, in 1821 AD, it was a gnat) the blessing of being congenitally copacetic. bliss and jhanas just ooze out of the little thing, and he lives his life in absolute satisfaction, free from want, from pain, from need. of course, none of the gnats currently alive descends from our lucky fellow. i don’t think knowledge of this fact moves my darwinism from “biology” to “ideology”.
“adaptive” not being a fixed target does not change the above fact, nor the equally self-evident truth that, all being equal, “more intelligence” is never maladaptive.
finally, i define “intelligence” not as “more compute” as much as “more power to understand your environment, as measured by your ability to shape it according to your will”.
does this bring our positions any closer?