Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
nytimes.com
Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
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Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#2I've always thought the 'living in a simulation' scenario and creationism are pretty much the same thing, if the person that started the simulation felt some sort of rules ought to be followed (for the longevity of the simulation, or whatever reason they might have). That doesn't seem like a stretch - we do that with the Sim games, and we're hardly brilliant.
Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#3Betteridge's law of headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'.
Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#4Well, if time is somehow "leaky", if the barrier between future and present is not absolutely, 100% impenetrable, then it's quite a distinct possibility that a future superintelligence would meddle into the affairs of its own past, perhaps with the goal of enabling its own existence.
Both general relativity and quantum mechanics seem to suggest that time is not perfectly linear (GR) and not perfectly crisp or perfectly clearly delineated (QM). Of course, there is a long way from these suggestions to time travel - but the thing is, you don't need time travel in the pop-sci sense. All you need is a "leak" of some interactions, however tenuous, from the distant future into the present. You only need to manipulate the states of a tiny number of particles in the brains and/or chromosomes of various creatures, affecting the wave functions of a few atoms and then allowing the effects to play out from there.
To be sure, this is very highly speculative, and I'm not suggesting this is what is actually happening. I'm just saying - if this, then that. Or, to put it in clearer terms, the conditions are:
1. Time is ever so slightly "leaky".
2. A vast, extraordinarily powerful superintelligence will emerge in the future, or humanity will in effect be that for all practical purposes.
It would be essentially the equivalent of God leaving biologic evolution and human progress mostly to their own devices, but once in a while putting his thumb on those respective scales. In this scenario, evolution would be a bipolar process: powered by the usual push of genetics, natural selection, etc at the bottom, but also informed by the pull of a future ideal at the top.
Going much further, kickstarting life, or even triggering the beginning of this Universe could also be targets of interest for manipulation.
Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#5Betteridge's law of headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'.
Agreed. Evolution doesn't even have a purpose, let alone a higher one. Also, fusion doesn't have a purpose, nor does gravity.
Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#6Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#7Both the Intelligent Alien and Simulation ideas just push the question of 'purpose' up a level. Sure, the aliens may have a purpose, but if they are themselves a cosmological purposeless accident then by extension it's arguable that so are we.
Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#8Betteridge's law of headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'.
Agreed. Evolution doesn't even have a purpose, let alone a higher one. Also, fusion doesn't have a purpose, nor does gravity.
Exactly.
>"Myth number three: Evolution couldn’t have a purpose, because it doesn’t have a direction."
"
>"on balance evolution tends to create beings of greater and greater complexity"
Just because something has a direction doesn't mean it has a purpose. A warm body cools, that is a direction, but there isn't an invisible man in the sky causing that, it is simply a law of thermodynamics.
Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#9We're a zoo for a higher intelligence? Joke is on them, reality is a simulation! Turtles.
Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#10Both the Intelligent Alien and Simulation ideas just push the question of 'purpose' up a level. Sure, the aliens may have a purpose, but if they are themselves a cosmological purposeless accident then by extension it's arguable that so are we.
> Both the Intelligent Alien and Simulation ideas just push the question of 'purpose' up a level
They do, but while the 'kid in his garage running the simulation' may have no purpose, I guess the article author is suggesting that in a simulation our 'purpose' is to let the experiment play out and entertain this transcendental 'kid'.