Given that human brains are known not to be able to intuitively process even moderately large numbers, I’d say the question can’t meaningfully be asked—our ethical modules simply can’t process it. 3^^^3 is too large—WAY too large.
Caledonian2
Karma: 559
Cooking something for two hours at 350 degrees isn’t equivalent to cooking something at 700 degrees for one hour.
I’d rather accept one additional dust speck per lifetime in 3^^^3 lives than have one lifetime out of 3^^^3 lives involve fifty years of torture.
Of course, that’s me saying that, with my single life. If I actually had that many lives to live, I might become so bored that I’d opt for the torture merely for a change of pace.
Even so, I can read literary works that praise Death, and to praise death is also a great corruption of human spirit, and yet I judge these works as well-executed.
Another opinion masquerading as reason. I think you need to think deeply about a universe in which death would not exist before making such claims.
Those are laments on what you feel the negative consequences of involuntary death are. Nowhere do I see a systematic examination of what death is and what it does—and doesn’t do.
People live in a world where life is fragile and difficult to sustain, and so they cling to life and abhor death. In a world where life was so resilient that it was virtually indestructible, it’s death that would be valued.
Our metabolism IS capable of detecting which nutrients we’re low on and setting up cravings for foods we’ve learned are rich in those substances. Fat used to be such to be such a rare and valuable nutrient that there was no reason to ever restrict our intake of it—the more we could get, the better to survive the next famine.
I like having a Creator I can outwit.
It really bothers you that a mindless, unthinking process is smarter than you, doesn’t it.
The wonder of evolution is that it works at all.
It’s a process that, given certain rudimentary facts about existence, MUST occur. It’s totally mindless, relies on trial-and-error, and is unspeakably powerful. You can’t make designs better than it can—you can’t even make designs as well as it can. At most, you can take incredibly complex systems it’s created and point out a few places where you could put a patch to make things even better. You can do this by using a brain evolution is responsible for.
Evolution doesn’t recognize your inherent ‘specialness’ at all. Nothing in the universe does, come to think of it, except a few other people. Almost the entirety of the universe is utterly indifferent to your existence: no stars in the sky heralding your birth, no suns dimming at your passing, no cosmic phenomena that mirror what you think, what you feel.
How that must vex you!
Certainly life has been evolving for billions of years, and there’s no way to guess at what humans might design over a similar period of time.
So let’s look at evolutionary algorithms—specifically, those implemented in computers and used to generate microchip designs. What human designer even comes close to what a repeated cycle of mutation and selection has been demonstrated to be capable of?
Our models of the world are necessarily imperfect approximations of the underlying reality. Evolution is a functio nof the reality itself, not an approximation of it, and as such it will always have a power that no amount of rational analysis can even approach. It’s like flowing water—unable to look at the surrounding territory and adjust its behavior accordingly, but unerring in responding appropriately to its immediate environment.
The most sophisticated information-processing device in the known universe was not only designed by evolution, but operates on evolutionary principles. If you insist upon attempting to impose design, you will never accomplish what letting order arise from chaos can.
It wasn’t evolution that built your computer
Which one? Because my human-built computer is inferior is virtually every way to the one evolution produced. The only real advantages the electronic model has are that it’s easy to make backups for it, and people have been writing viruses for it for a shorter period of time.
We have imperfect models, but evolution doesn’t have a model at all, which is why it’s stupid.
Its stupidity is still smarter than the most brilliant human.
it necessarily can’t plan for the future
True. But it never fails to react appropriately to the local conditions, which humans are actually quite bad at doing. Neither are we very good at planning for or anticipating the future. But perhaps you don’t consider triggering the Sixth Great Extinction to reflect poorly upon humanity’s ability for forethought.
it’s annoying to smugly point out things that people are already perfectly aware of
It is very important to point out things that people are already perfectly aware of but choose to ignore. The annoyingness is just a bonus. And as the readers of this site are already quite aware, the methods that make thought most powerful are those that are most antithetical to natural human modes of thought: logic and mathematics. Bayes’ Theorem is smarter than the humans that use it. Funny, that.
The same fate would accrue to any human planner who tried making random point mutations to their strategies and waiting 768 iterations of testing to adopt a 3% improvement.
If your engineers are struggling to produce even 1% improvements in your design, and the benefits of even a marginal improvement are sufficiently large, it might well be worth trying such a strategy. The more complex and humanly-incomprehensible the system is, the more likely that such a strategy would yield bonuses that rational analysis couldn’t reach, as well.
Rationality is unspeakably powerful, but it’s not everything.
Remember that it took billions of years of evolution before the Cambrian explosion.
That would be a powerful argument, if biological evolution had a telos that included the production of complex multicellular organisms. Sadly, it doesn’t. Astronomically speaking, rock-eating, single-celled creatures are probably far better equipped for survival in this universe than we are.
Evolution seems to have you outnumbered.
A lot of our DNA was acquired in the days when our ancestors were not yet mammals.
Excluding the complex and subtle regulatory functions that non-coding DNA can possess strikes me as being extremely unwise.
There is no DNA in the maize genome that codes for striped kernels, because that color pattern is the result of transposons modulating gene expression. The behavior of one transposon is intricately linked to the total behavior of all transposons, and the genetic shifts they result in defy the simple mathematical rules of Mendelian inheritance. But more importantly, the behavior of transposons is deeply linked to the physical structure of the encoding regions they’re associated with.
Roughly half the genome of corn is made up of transposons. Is this ‘junk’ or not?
Quite a lot of mutations are so lethal that they abort embryonic development, yes. This is a severe problem with organisms drawn from a narrow gene pool, like humans and corn, and less so with others. It’s worth noting that, if we consider these mutations in the argument, we have to consider not only the children who are born and are weeded out, but all of the embryos conceived and lost as well.
Given how few conceptions actually make it to birth, and how many infants died young before the advent of modern medicine, humans didn’t lose two out of four, they lost more like two out of eight-to-twelve.
Even in the argument, it applies to organisms that lose half of their offspring to selection. It’s different for those that lose more, or less.
But mammals have many ways of weeding out harmful variations, from antler fights to spermatozoa competition. And that’s just if they have the four children. The provided 1 bit/generation figure isn’t an upper bound, either.
Life spends a lot of time in non-equilibrium states as well, and those are the states in which evolution can operate most quickly.
Read a biology textbook, darn it. The DNA contents of a sperm have negligible impact on the sperm’s ability to penetrate the egg.
Defective sperm—which are more-than-normally likely to be carry screwed-up DNA—is far less likely to reach the egg, and far less likely to penetrate it before a fully functional spermatozoan does. It’s a weeding-out process.
As for antler fights, it doesn’t matter how individuals are removed from the gene pool.
Of course it does! Just not to the maximum-bit-rate argument.Yes, but they must be balanced by states where it operates more slowly.
No, they mustn’t. They can theoretically be kept in a constant non-equilibrium.
With sufficiently large selection populations, it’s not clear to me how anything could be better than natural selection, since natural selection is what the system is trying to beat. Any model of natural selection will necessarily contain inaccuracies.
How can we define the information content of the mutation responsible for Huntington’s Disease? It occurs in a non-coding section, it’s technically a collection of similiar mutations, and it seems to have something to do with the physical structure of the chromosome rather than coding in the simple sense.
Obviously, selection on the level of the individual won’t produce individual restraint in breeding. Individuals who reproduce unrestrainedly will, naturally, produce more offspring than individuals who restrain themselves.
Wrong. Sometimes quality, not quantity, matters. Which is why rabbits will abort and reabsorb fetuses when under stress, even though the reabsorption process has a significant chance of causing permanent infertility.
It’s not about which organism produces the greatest number of offspring—although restricting fertility can sometimes lead to that—but the greatest number of surviving offspring. It’s more complex than a madcap race to reproduce as rapidly and prolifically as possible.
Feynman didn’t understand physics. Which isn’t particularly shameful, since no one else understands physics either.