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Evolution doesn't decide of course, although your comment just brought to mind another thought: Evolution exhausts the lowest energy possibilities first, befor

Evolution doesn't decide of course, although your comment just brought to mind another thought: Evolution exhausts the lowest energy possibilities first, before moving on to higher energy configurations. The surviving lower energy configurations are then in effect used as legos to create higher energy, more expensive configurations. If any of those building blocks are "deprecated", perhaps this effects things up the line, leading to the probability that cheaper, more basic constructions will survive longer because they have fewer steps in a given dependency chain. Maybe this is obvious to people that understand evolution well, but I hadn't considered it that way before. In this way, upon reaching some equilibrium where there are base features that reliably survive, evolution "decides" to try more complicated things. My abstraction could be totally off though, so feel free to tell me so if that's the case.

posterboy 10y ago
> Evolution doesn't decide > Evolution exhausts So, the remark is not about evolution being passive, but that the ability to decide requires sapience? I think, decidability is elementary to programming and in that sense completely mechanic. Anything else is begging the question of free will and the jury's still out on that one, so your "of course" is illegitimate. > Evolution exhausts the lowest energy possibilities first, before moving on to higher energy configurations. that's basic arithmetic. You can't have all the other numbers without the first. > higher energy, more expensive configurations. Expense and state are not equal. First, energy from the current state has to be expensed to activate some process, that will in turn increase or decrease the energetic state. > If any of those building blocks are "deprecated", perhaps this effects things up the line, leading to the probability that cheaper, more basic constructions will survive longer because they have fewer steps in a given dependency chain. That's a non sequitur motivated by observation. The idea of entropy is from thermodynamics and I'm not fit at that, but I think it is just defined for closed systems. Same basic Issue as with the free will, it depends on your knowledge of the limits of the system. If you deem free will a thing, why would you consider a bigger system, that works on a much larger timescale than humans, that is virtually limitless, to have a lesser degree of freedom, ie. none?
- deleted 10y ago
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- dave_sullivan 10y ago
  > so your "of course" is illegitimate. > that's basic arithmetic. > That's a non sequitur motivated by observation. Gotta say I'm unconvinced by your argument.
  - posterboy 10y ago
    I was tempted to delete the "illegitimate". I'm sorry for that, I'm a bit tempered. I was going to insert to write more on thermodynamics and philosophy, ie. metaphyiscs, and canceled that edit all together. Note that "observation" is a literal translation of theory and your statement is purely theoretic. In practice we have all kinds of complex "energetic configurations" roaming the earth, locally increasing the entropy.
harperlee 10y ago
> Evolution doesn't decide In a sense it does, doesn't it? And even if it does not, it is a very useful mechanism to explain something: model it against other known things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor

posterboy 10y ago

> Evolution doesn't decide > Evolution exhausts So, the remark is not about evolution being passive, but that the ability to decide requires sapience? I think, decidability is elementary to programming and in that sense completely mechanic. Anything else is begging the question of free will and the jury's still out on that one, so your "of course" is illegitimate. > Evolution exhausts the lowest energy possibilities first, before moving on to higher energy configurations. that's basic arithmetic. You can't have all the other numbers without the first. > higher energy, more expensive configurations. Expense and state are not equal. First, energy from the current state has to be expensed to activate some process, that will in turn increase or decrease the energetic state. > If any of those building blocks are "deprecated", perhaps this effects things up the line, leading to the probability that cheaper, more basic constructions will survive longer because they have fewer steps in a given dependency chain. That's a non sequitur motivated by observation. The idea of entropy is from thermodynamics and I'm not fit at that, but I think it is just defined for closed systems. Same basic Issue as with the free will, it depends on your knowledge of the limits of the system. If you deem free will a thing, why would you consider a bigger system, that works on a much larger timescale than humans, that is virtually limitless, to have a lesser degree of freedom, ie. none?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dave_sullivan 10y ago
> so your "of course" is illegitimate. > that's basic arithmetic. > That's a non sequitur motivated by observation. Gotta say I'm unconvinced by your argument.
- posterboy 10y ago
  I was tempted to delete the "illegitimate". I'm sorry for that, I'm a bit tempered. I was going to insert to write more on thermodynamics and philosophy, ie. metaphyiscs, and canceled that edit all together. Note that "observation" is a literal translation of theory and your statement is purely theoretic. In practice we have all kinds of complex "energetic configurations" roaming the earth, locally increasing the entropy.

harperlee 10y ago

> Evolution doesn't decide In a sense it does, doesn't it? And even if it does not, it is a very useful mechanism to explain something: model it against other known things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor