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Evolved how? According to what selection criterion? There has to be an environment or you just get a random walk across state space. Evolution is a learning pro
by api 10y ago
Evolved how? According to what selection criterion? There has to be an environment or you just get a random walk across state space. Evolution is a learning process that transfers information from the environment into the evolving system as such information pertains to an implied goal function.
Selection need not be wholly external. It can be emergent from within the system, as it is with life viewed collectively as it manifests ecology and coevolution. But in the end there is still the basic criterion of mortality and reproductive fitness that serves as a top level goal function to orient the entire system. There is the environment and the implied goal of genetic survival.
What might the top level goal function be for an evolving universe? And where would it come from? How can "all that there is" possess an environment?
Of course in an eternal universe model with changing physical laws you could have a random walk across state space, but this amounts to saying the digits of pi contain Shakespeare. They do but it doesn't tell us any more than infinite multiverse theories. In fact we might call this an infinite multiverse theory linearized across time instead of parallelized across dimensions.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago> But in the end there is still the basic criterion of mortality and reproductive fitness that serves as a top level goal function to orient the entire system. Reproductive fitness is necessary to apply the concept of evolution, but mortality isn't.
- api 10y agoThat is true if you have infinite capacity, such as a hypothetical biology in an infinite environment with infinite resources. Is he proposing infinite universes? In that case I'm not sure I see the difference between this and multiverse theories.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoNo, it's always true. If you don't have infinite capacity, then you will have mortality, but that's a separate issue.