What if we're just a school science experiment for a higher intelligence? Like some kid's ant farm, where we are the ants!
Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
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Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#12higher purpose = species survival over individual survival.
That's why genomes have features in place which, for individuals, can suck -- senescence and cancer being the top 2.
See also conatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conatus, a philosophical property whereby a thing tends to improve.
Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#13I'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.
In essence, they are the same thing, but Darwinists won't admit this because "religion". Heck, just bringing up the thought got you downvoted.
Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#14I'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.
The simulation argument is the same notion as Anselm's Ontological Argument.
Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#15Well, 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 perfect…
> 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)
Neither QM nor GR admit retrocausality. Even interactions that look time-inverted still don't let you send information back in time.
I'm also not sure I agree with the idea that QM says anything is not "clearly delineated". Uncertainty relations in QM are less interesting statements than most people seem to think. It's not a matter of nature being inexact or something, it's just the fact that most physical operators don't share the same eigenstates. E.g. You wouldn't say a standing wave is "moving at x m/s" (because it's standing still), while on the other hand you wouldn't say "the wavelength of this point is k" (because points don't have wavelengths). But standing waves have wavelengths and point particles have velocities. Nothing in this description suggests to me that nature itself is inexact. It might be, but vanilla QM doesn't require it to be.
Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#16Do you think it's reasonable that conversations like this are fine on HN, but anytime I bring up Christian thought on the matter I am pressured to "not talk religion"?
Wrestling with these top shelf Maslow's questions like "why am I/we here?", "what is the meaning of life" and other big life questions are common among all of us. So why the willingness to conjecture that (we live in a simulation | aliens may have seeded life on earth | evolution has a purpose) yet outright reject any religious discussion?
Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#17I very much believe evolution has a higher purpose. Nothing alive would exist if it didn't. It's not nice, though... [1]
Unfortunately, whether it's just physics, a simulation, or aliens, it's bad news in every case, and I don't see myself relating to the view that evolution is beautiful or has any interest whatsoever in moral progress anytime soon.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everythi...
Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#18higher purpose = species survival over individual survival. That's why genomes have features in place which, for individuals, can suck -- senescence and cancer being the top 2. See also conatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conatus , a philosophical property whereby a thing tends to improve.
Your wiki link ("conatus") suffers from selection bias. We're only likely to see things that are stable.
Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#19Hah. I generally respect Robert Wright, but man you can set your watch to him taking time to shit on Stephen Jay Gould in whatever he writes.
Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?
#20What if we're just a school science experiment for a higher intelligence? Like some kid's ant farm, where we are the ants!
Why the downvote? If life & intelligence could be the result as the article states of an alien advanced life-form, then to them we're like a little ant colony they have set in motion. In that context, maybe we're not even that special - maybe we're just a small experiment in someone's educational experience.