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Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?

46 points by not_that_noob 10y ago

DougN7 10y ago
I'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.
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  In essence, they are the same thing, but Darwinists won't admit this because "religion". Heck, just bringing up the thought got you downvoted.
  - skc 10y ago
    > but Darwinists won't admit this because "religion". I don't see how that follows. "Religion" doesn't just make the claim that there is a creator and leaves it at that. In fact I'd have more respect for religion if it did.
    - Cyph0n 10y ago
      What I mean is that Darwinism's extreme anti-religion stance means that it won't accept any idea that even has a tiny whiff of creationism. This is why some Darwinists are going with the simulation argument to address the shortcomings of the theory. Take a look at the kind of criticism the ID movement has been getting. Their whole argument is that "something" must have designed the universe. They do not explicitly argue for a God, and some proponents even accept the simulation argument! Nonetheless, Darwinisim wouldn't touch ID with a 60-foot stick.
- hprotagonist 10y ago
  The simulation argument is the same notion as Anselm's Ontological Argument.
- ozy 10y ago
  If we are living in a simulation, it is a simulation of atoms, or quantum fields, or perhaps something deeper behind that. That got started with enormous energy in the form of hot dense quark gluon plasma. From there the rest follows. It is not a simulation of humans. We have zero indication there are rules at a higher level than the quantum or gravity. Like rules on what you ought to do in the bedroom. Also earth nor humans were created by intelligence, just like how mineral crystals or fjords are not created by intelligence. Hence we must conclude that bronze/iron age religions and maybe living in a simulator are not the same thing. For the rest of this question of a creator, we cannot know, anybody claiming to know anything beyond "perhaps" or "maybe" is a fool, or will win a nobel price. By lack of the latter the rest of us will assume the first.
  - DougN7 10y ago
    You're taking some mighty large liberties defining what our simulation is, and how it started. A simulation can begin with any state, including a hundred years ago with already written books and simulated Big Bang background radiation. There is no difference.
    - ozy 10y ago
      Beings that find themselves in a universe that was created a minute ago but looks old, would be correct when they conclude it looks old. Anything else is unknowable and can not be used to further any theories. Especially when such ideas are grounded in bronze age thinking. "There is no difference." Indeed, if god exists or not, there is no difference ...
      - DougN7 10y ago
        Well, there is no difference now. If someone has a big power button, or wants to inject things into the simulation later, or hold a final judgement, that will definitely matter. Not that we can stop it from happening either way. But perhaps we can please the Sim master...?
        10y ago
hacker_9 10y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'.
- sageikosa 10y ago
  Agreed. Evolution doesn't even have a purpose, let alone a higher one. Also, fusion doesn't have a purpose, nor does gravity.
  - zw123456 10y ago
    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.
  - gus_massa 10y ago
    Also agree. This is a disguised theological idea. I guess some weak version, where god is not in charge of moving each atom, god only makes some initial setup and give a purpose to everything. Replacing god with aliens doesn't make it scientific or more sensible. This is the power of the Ockham's razor. Just assume no god and no aliens and not whatever. How far can you get with this? Is there an experiment where the no god/alien/whaterver hypothesis fails?
    - projektir 10y ago
      I don't see how it's a disguised theological idea, yet you're turning it into one and then arguing against that. It's an argument for a process being treated as an agent even if it's blind. The disagreement there is more philosophical (I currently don't know why most people seem to believe that blind agency is not valid, I imagine it's related to beliefs in free will at some level) and not at all theological, at least, from my perspective. If anything, gods were likely created to make various observed processes more understandable by giving them agency without going through a bunch of philosophical hoops. I would say that's very reasonable. A lot more reasonable than pretending that the process does nothing and poises no danger.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
Well, 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.
- wyager 10y ago
  > 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.
empath75 10y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=FLRhV1rWIpm_pU19bBm_2RXw&v=HxTnqKuNygE https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=FLRhV1rWIpm_pU19bBm_2RXw&... Counterpoint.
roywiggins 10y ago
Both 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.
- estefan 10y ago
  > 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'.
  - cortesoft 10y ago
    Right, but what gives the purpose created by the garage-kid any sway? What gives garage-kid the authority to set my purpose? Creating something doesn't automatically mean our purpose is what the creator says it is; I think most people don't subscribe to the belief that kids should always do whatever their parents think is important once they are adults. So in the end, what does it mean if the garage-kid created us to entertain him? Am I bound by that purpose? Does it somehow give my life more meaning?
    - roywiggins 10y ago
      Even worse, what if the purpose is malignant. What if we're part of a intradimensional torture device, or something? That seems even worse than purposelessness. Or we're all in Rick Sanchez's pocket universe spaceship battery.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  I did my thesis on the argument from design post-Darwin. A lot of interesting discussion centers on how to reconcile the generalized principle of mediocrity with the apparently low probability of a life-supporting universe existing (in terms of how fine-tuned basic constants have to be for it to happen). Some people try to end-run around this with anthropic arguments (which better writers than myself have pointed out are fallacious when applied this way); others try to build on QM and a many-worlds approach to posit that a universe like ours is possible and thus must exist (and in fact a large number of them, similar but each slightly different, must exist). And some turn not to the Judeo-Christian literal-biblical-reading everything-created-in-six-days idea of "God", but to the general idea that our universe might be the product of intelligence. And a lot of that work focuses on simulation arguments, which solve the seemingly-improbable "tuning" of our universe's physical constants by saying that they were in fact tuned by some intelligence for a particular purpose. That purpose need not be to produce us, or anything resembling us (perhaps we are simply a side effect of a set of constants that produce some other result that's actually of interest to the simulators), and might be as banal as "to see what happens when you plug in these values for the constants", but the purpose would nonetheless exist. There's also a line of reasoning which comes out of that and says that once such a capability exists, suddenly our own universe does not appear so unlikely. All it takes is one universe, somewhere, with constants providing the ability to simulate other universes (which is more general and thus more likely than constants providing the specific configuration of our own universe), and you get to add not just simulations running in that universe, but simulations running in simulations running in simulations... and so on all the way down. At which point the number of universes which exist and support intelligent life grows dramatically, possibly even rivaling the number of universes which exist and do not support intelligent life. Though on a completely different tack there are people who've run with the idea that singularities fire off big bangs of their own, producing new universes not visible from ours, and posited a kind of natural selection principle based on that: universes which give rise to singularities will have more "offspring", so universes which give rise to singularities should be more common than universes which don't. And since one easy way to get singularities is through organized clumping of matter which can then undergo gravitational collapse, and that same thing is what allows us to exist, it's not so unlikely to see our universe.
canadian_voter 10y ago
We're a zoo for a higher intelligence? Joke is on them, reality is a simulation! Turtles.
not_that_noob 10y ago
What if we're just a school science experiment for a higher intelligence? Like some kid's ant farm, where we are the ants!
- not_that_noob 10y ago
  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.
awinter-py 10y ago
higher 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conatus, a philosophical property whereby a thing tends to improve.
- wyager 10y ago
  Your wiki link ("conatus") suffers from selection bias. We're only likely to see things that are stable.
  - awinter-py 10y ago
    Stable systems get beaten by their competitors. It's systems/species that are organized to improve which will tend to survive.
milesf 10y ago
Do 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?
- projektir 10y ago
  I guess part of it is what to do with a religious claim. If you say: "God created us all", that's fair, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere to go from there. I can either agree with you or disagree, but I can't really discuss it.
  - phkahler 10y ago
    And yet this article points out that these other notions are equivalent to saying god made it. It's OK for elon musk to think we are a simulation created by someone, but not on to say "religion". I found Musk's idea equally stupid for that very reason. May as well say the universe is on a turtles back. But what's that turtle standing on? It's turtles all the way down.
    - projektir 10y ago
      God and simulation to me are fundamentally different, but that may be because I dabbled in religion a lot. The simulation hypothesis, to me, is not terribly surprising or interesting. Why wouldn't someone be able to create a simulation like ours at some point? I am not following why Musk's belief is stupid? Yeah, obviously there's another layer above, and this doesn't explain that much, but I don't understand the stupid part. God is something else. For one, not all gods in religions are the same. The Christian God is not a mere simulator. He's everything that ever was (i.e., final level), he's super powerful, and, most importantly, as far as Christianity is concerned everything that God does is right.
projektir 10y ago
I 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-everything-else-2/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everythi...
tyrannoflorist 10y ago
Hah. 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.
fiatjaf 10y ago
By definition, shouldn't any process have its ends present in potentia at its beginning?
socmag 10y ago
Well duh. Yes I realize that comment seems "trite" What is it that the genome is doing. Look around and see how it is expressing itself. I'm not a huge fan of Dawkins recently after he went a bit nuts on the whole atheism thing. Not because of the atheism thing but because it distracted him from what he was really about. The genome is expressing itself, and it is way more than selfish. That thing is regression analysis to a large power. Constantly calculating minimal cost to self preservation and better versions of itself. We can learn a lot. Personally I think its whole purpose is to build its own God. And the next God and the next... and it is doing it. (I am a "classical" atheist) Down votes or up votes, please explain.
- projektir 10y ago
  I would say that the genome is not getting to be truly selfish here, rather, it's just a tool of evolution, and evolution as a whole is the one with the purpose, but I don't know if it has enough forward-vision to create a specific entity as much as go for higher complexity whether it's through one complex being or a complex network of simple beings. There's a lot of odd downvoting in this thread...
  - socmag 10y ago
    "Evolution" is a man made term for "The Genome is trying to create a better entity than itself" I think with regard to humans it is well on its way to manifesting itself with that purpose... It's called" The sum total of the Internet". Not sure I agree with its choices, but compared to an individual there is quite a large organism at large there, for better or worse, and that thing is just as potent and self protective as DNA. Go try attack it. Good luck. Evolution just got evolved. The Genome is building new infrastructure as we speak.
    - projektir 10y ago
      Funny, for all the claims that evolution has been defeated, humans act very much like everything under evolution has acted since it got started. And those genomes that want to make a better version of themselves seem to just follow what evolution wants them to do to this day. Without evolution, and the precursor to it (Big Bang if you will) the genomes wouldn't exist to begin with. It is not from their own cause that they came to exist.
goldesel 10y ago
Mckenna shares thoughts on the nature of time, novetly, consciousness and how we are rapidly evolving technologically as a species at a rate thosands of times faster than any living organism through the power of our imagination, creativity and inventions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnjsoBF5Ay0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnjsoBF5Ay0
psadri 10y ago
What we call "evolution" is simply the bias towards survival present in self replication. The bias is present because the genomes that did not exhibit it died out in competition with the ones that did. The fact that we as humans feel it so profoundly is a testament to the complexity that can emerge from a simple process given enough time.
ozy 10y ago
If compute power is the only thing that matters, we do not live in a simulation. The best computer we can hope to build in the future will only have a minute fraction of the compute power of reality. Simulating reality on that computer will either be a tiny reality, or a much lower fidelity reality. If you find yourself alive, likely you live where there is the most compute power, therefor, base reality. Especially since we have zero indicators that any part of our reality is "fake". Think about a character in the Sims, it would never be able to understand the mechanism by which its arm moves, if it understood its world completely. Because those movements are part of the simulator, not part of the simulated world. Arm movement is not an emergent effect. Our reality however is based on atoms. Or quantum fields if you want to go deeper. And maybe some kind of cellular automata behind that. If evolution had a purpose, we can detect an upwards line in complexity, and we must conclude it is unlikely we humans are the end station. Probably we will create self replicating intelligent machines that can colonize space. Emotional meat bags are not very suitable ...
- hathawsh 10y ago
  Reality in the universe one level up could be different in such a way that it is more conducive to creation of virtual universes. Our idea of reality could be a mere shadow of what others think of as reality.
  - ozy 10y ago
    From our universe, and simulations we can create, and simulations in there, etc. it holds. It is interesting to think that an outside universe could be so different it does not hold going up to base reality. But that implies that logic, math, and computability, are different there. That is not very likely, though ultimately unknowable to us. Literally "a mere shadow of what others think of as reality" implies that that universe has a lot more compute. Therefor with much higher probability you would have evolved directly in their universe, on some tiny pinhead, or in a corner of their universe, not in a simulation they create, no matter how many they create.
danielam 10y ago
Lots of muddled thinking, but some good points and a good start. There are a couple of things in particular that I think are interesting and worth drawing attention to. None of these are religious ideas per se; they are philosophical. The first is the the idea of telos. Telos in the philosophical sense refers to that toward which something is ordered. It is frequently misunderstood as something identical with conscious intent, but it has nothing to do with such intent per se, only with what may be called the causal structure of a thing. For example, when I say that a heart is ordered toward pumping blood through the circulatory system, I am not speaking of conscious purposes. I am speaking of the way in which the heart is structured and the way it functions and to what end it functions. Indeed, without telos, we could not explain efficient causality. We could not explain why hearts tend to pump blood instead of, say, materializing elephants or playing the Dies Irae of Mozart's requiem. Even biologists who strive to suppress talk of telos inevitably resort to teleological language like "function". Sometimes such terminology is dismissed as only metaphorical, but such dismissals are flippant and do not pass closer examination. After all, if a term is metaphorical, then you have to ask what the metaphor stands for. Deny teleological language and biology ceases to make sense. The reason teleology has been a difficult thing to digest has largely to do with the mechanistic turn in philosophy that has seeped deeply into ideas about science. Notice how popular debates between atheistic, materialist proponents and theistic, dualist opponents of evolution typically center on the probability of something as complex as life arising without a mind to have caused it. Paley's ghost haunts the discussion. The reason is that both the opponents and proponents of evolution in these debates hold to a mechanistic, Cartesian metaphysics where teleology is conceived of as extrinsically imposed by a divine intellect and now something intrinsic to things in themselves. Of course, the proponent will deny the divine intellect, just as he will deny the immaterial Cartesian mind, but he will not have not escaped the metaphysics altogether. This metaphysics has causes a proliferation of problems in philosophy that admit no solutions. However, it is a mistake to think that this metaphysics is the old contender. There is a small but vibrant revival of Aristotelean metaphysics under way and with it comes a "revival" of teleology.
- danielam 10y ago
  Sorry, had to run. Errata: "The first is the idea of telos." "conceived of as extrinsically imposed by a divine intellect and not something intrinsic to things" "he will not have escaped" "This metaphysics has caused a proliferation" "this metaphysics is the only contender"
tokenadult 10y ago
The response from Jerry Coyne, a professor of biology who has literally written the book about evolution, is definitive. https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/robert-wright-in-the-nyt-evolution-could-have-a-higher-purpose/ https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/robert-w...

46 points by not_that_noob 10y ago

I'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.

Cyph0n 10y ago
In essence, they are the same thing, but Darwinists won't admit this because "religion". Heck, just bringing up the thought got you downvoted.
- skc 10y ago
  > but Darwinists won't admit this because "religion". I don't see how that follows. "Religion" doesn't just make the claim that there is a creator and leaves it at that. In fact I'd have more respect for religion if it did.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    What I mean is that Darwinism's extreme anti-religion stance means that it won't accept any idea that even has a tiny whiff of creationism. This is why some Darwinists are going with the simulation argument to address the shortcomings of the theory. Take a look at the kind of criticism the ID movement has been getting. Their whole argument is that "something" must have designed the universe. They do not explicitly argue for a God, and some proponents even accept the simulation argument! Nonetheless, Darwinisim wouldn't touch ID with a 60-foot stick.
hprotagonist 10y ago
The simulation argument is the same notion as Anselm's Ontological Argument.
ozy 10y ago
If we are living in a simulation, it is a simulation of atoms, or quantum fields, or perhaps something deeper behind that. That got started with enormous energy in the form of hot dense quark gluon plasma. From there the rest follows. It is not a simulation of humans. We have zero indication there are rules at a higher level than the quantum or gravity. Like rules on what you ought to do in the bedroom. Also earth nor humans were created by intelligence, just like how mineral crystals or fjords are not created by intelligence. Hence we must conclude that bronze/iron age religions and maybe living in a simulator are not the same thing. For the rest of this question of a creator, we cannot know, anybody claiming to know anything beyond "perhaps" or "maybe" is a fool, or will win a nobel price. By lack of the latter the rest of us will assume the first.
- DougN7 10y ago
  You're taking some mighty large liberties defining what our simulation is, and how it started. A simulation can begin with any state, including a hundred years ago with already written books and simulated Big Bang background radiation. There is no difference.
  - ozy 10y ago
    Beings that find themselves in a universe that was created a minute ago but looks old, would be correct when they conclude it looks old. Anything else is unknowable and can not be used to further any theories. Especially when such ideas are grounded in bronze age thinking. "There is no difference." Indeed, if god exists or not, there is no difference ...
    - DougN7 10y ago
      Well, there is no difference now. If someone has a big power button, or wants to inject things into the simulation later, or hold a final judgement, that will definitely matter. Not that we can stop it from happening either way. But perhaps we can please the Sim master...?
      - 10y ago

hacker_9 10y ago

Betteridge's law of headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'.

sageikosa 10y ago
Agreed. Evolution doesn't even have a purpose, let alone a higher one. Also, fusion doesn't have a purpose, nor does gravity.
- zw123456 10y ago
  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.
- gus_massa 10y ago
  Also agree. This is a disguised theological idea. I guess some weak version, where god is not in charge of moving each atom, god only makes some initial setup and give a purpose to everything. Replacing god with aliens doesn't make it scientific or more sensible. This is the power of the Ockham's razor. Just assume no god and no aliens and not whatever. How far can you get with this? Is there an experiment where the no god/alien/whaterver hypothesis fails?
  - projektir 10y ago
    I don't see how it's a disguised theological idea, yet you're turning it into one and then arguing against that. It's an argument for a process being treated as an agent even if it's blind. The disagreement there is more philosophical (I currently don't know why most people seem to believe that blind agency is not valid, I imagine it's related to beliefs in free will at some level) and not at all theological, at least, from my perspective. If anything, gods were likely created to make various observed processes more understandable by giving them agency without going through a bunch of philosophical hoops. I would say that's very reasonable. A lot more reasonable than pretending that the process does nothing and poises no danger.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

Well, 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.

wyager 10y ago
> 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.

empath75 10y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=FLRhV1rWIpm_pU19bBm_2RXw&v=HxTnqKuNygE https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=FLRhV1rWIpm_pU19bBm_2RXw&... Counterpoint.

roywiggins 10y ago

Both 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.

estefan 10y ago
> 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'.
- cortesoft 10y ago
  Right, but what gives the purpose created by the garage-kid any sway? What gives garage-kid the authority to set my purpose? Creating something doesn't automatically mean our purpose is what the creator says it is; I think most people don't subscribe to the belief that kids should always do whatever their parents think is important once they are adults. So in the end, what does it mean if the garage-kid created us to entertain him? Am I bound by that purpose? Does it somehow give my life more meaning?
  - roywiggins 10y ago
    Even worse, what if the purpose is malignant. What if we're part of a intradimensional torture device, or something? That seems even worse than purposelessness. Or we're all in Rick Sanchez's pocket universe spaceship battery.
ubernostrum 10y ago
I did my thesis on the argument from design post-Darwin. A lot of interesting discussion centers on how to reconcile the generalized principle of mediocrity with the apparently low probability of a life-supporting universe existing (in terms of how fine-tuned basic constants have to be for it to happen). Some people try to end-run around this with anthropic arguments (which better writers than myself have pointed out are fallacious when applied this way); others try to build on QM and a many-worlds approach to posit that a universe like ours is possible and thus must exist (and in fact a large number of them, similar but each slightly different, must exist). And some turn not to the Judeo-Christian literal-biblical-reading everything-created-in-six-days idea of "God", but to the general idea that our universe might be the product of intelligence. And a lot of that work focuses on simulation arguments, which solve the seemingly-improbable "tuning" of our universe's physical constants by saying that they were in fact tuned by some intelligence for a particular purpose. That purpose need not be to produce us, or anything resembling us (perhaps we are simply a side effect of a set of constants that produce some other result that's actually of interest to the simulators), and might be as banal as "to see what happens when you plug in these values for the constants", but the purpose would nonetheless exist. There's also a line of reasoning which comes out of that and says that once such a capability exists, suddenly our own universe does not appear so unlikely. All it takes is one universe, somewhere, with constants providing the ability to simulate other universes (which is more general and thus more likely than constants providing the specific configuration of our own universe), and you get to add not just simulations running in that universe, but simulations running in simulations running in simulations... and so on all the way down. At which point the number of universes which exist and support intelligent life grows dramatically, possibly even rivaling the number of universes which exist and do not support intelligent life. Though on a completely different tack there are people who've run with the idea that singularities fire off big bangs of their own, producing new universes not visible from ours, and posited a kind of natural selection principle based on that: universes which give rise to singularities will have more "offspring", so universes which give rise to singularities should be more common than universes which don't. And since one easy way to get singularities is through organized clumping of matter which can then undergo gravitational collapse, and that same thing is what allows us to exist, it's not so unlikely to see our universe.

canadian_voter 10y ago

We're a zoo for a higher intelligence? Joke is on them, reality is a simulation! Turtles.

not_that_noob 10y ago

What if we're just a school science experiment for a higher intelligence? Like some kid's ant farm, where we are the ants!

not_that_noob 10y ago
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.

awinter-py 10y ago

higher 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conatus, a philosophical property whereby a thing tends to improve.

wyager 10y ago
Your wiki link ("conatus") suffers from selection bias. We're only likely to see things that are stable.
- awinter-py 10y ago
  Stable systems get beaten by their competitors. It's systems/species that are organized to improve which will tend to survive.

milesf 10y ago

Do 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?

projektir 10y ago
I guess part of it is what to do with a religious claim. If you say: "God created us all", that's fair, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere to go from there. I can either agree with you or disagree, but I can't really discuss it.
- phkahler 10y ago
  And yet this article points out that these other notions are equivalent to saying god made it. It's OK for elon musk to think we are a simulation created by someone, but not on to say "religion". I found Musk's idea equally stupid for that very reason. May as well say the universe is on a turtles back. But what's that turtle standing on? It's turtles all the way down.
  - projektir 10y ago
    God and simulation to me are fundamentally different, but that may be because I dabbled in religion a lot. The simulation hypothesis, to me, is not terribly surprising or interesting. Why wouldn't someone be able to create a simulation like ours at some point? I am not following why Musk's belief is stupid? Yeah, obviously there's another layer above, and this doesn't explain that much, but I don't understand the stupid part. God is something else. For one, not all gods in religions are the same. The Christian God is not a mere simulator. He's everything that ever was (i.e., final level), he's super powerful, and, most importantly, as far as Christianity is concerned everything that God does is right.

projektir 10y ago

I 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-everything-else-2/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everythi...

tyrannoflorist 10y ago

Hah. 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.

fiatjaf 10y ago

By definition, shouldn't any process have its ends present in potentia at its beginning?

socmag 10y ago

Well duh. Yes I realize that comment seems "trite" What is it that the genome is doing. Look around and see how it is expressing itself. I'm not a huge fan of Dawkins recently after he went a bit nuts on the whole atheism thing. Not because of the atheism thing but because it distracted him from what he was really about. The genome is expressing itself, and it is way more than selfish. That thing is regression analysis to a large power. Constantly calculating minimal cost to self preservation and better versions of itself. We can learn a lot. Personally I think its whole purpose is to build its own God. And the next God and the next... and it is doing it. (I am a "classical" atheist) Down votes or up votes, please explain.

projektir 10y ago
I would say that the genome is not getting to be truly selfish here, rather, it's just a tool of evolution, and evolution as a whole is the one with the purpose, but I don't know if it has enough forward-vision to create a specific entity as much as go for higher complexity whether it's through one complex being or a complex network of simple beings. There's a lot of odd downvoting in this thread...
- socmag 10y ago
  "Evolution" is a man made term for "The Genome is trying to create a better entity than itself" I think with regard to humans it is well on its way to manifesting itself with that purpose... It's called" The sum total of the Internet". Not sure I agree with its choices, but compared to an individual there is quite a large organism at large there, for better or worse, and that thing is just as potent and self protective as DNA. Go try attack it. Good luck. Evolution just got evolved. The Genome is building new infrastructure as we speak.
  - projektir 10y ago
    Funny, for all the claims that evolution has been defeated, humans act very much like everything under evolution has acted since it got started. And those genomes that want to make a better version of themselves seem to just follow what evolution wants them to do to this day. Without evolution, and the precursor to it (Big Bang if you will) the genomes wouldn't exist to begin with. It is not from their own cause that they came to exist.

goldesel 10y ago

Mckenna shares thoughts on the nature of time, novetly, consciousness and how we are rapidly evolving technologically as a species at a rate thosands of times faster than any living organism through the power of our imagination, creativity and inventions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnjsoBF5Ay0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnjsoBF5Ay0

psadri 10y ago

What we call "evolution" is simply the bias towards survival present in self replication. The bias is present because the genomes that did not exhibit it died out in competition with the ones that did. The fact that we as humans feel it so profoundly is a testament to the complexity that can emerge from a simple process given enough time.

ozy 10y ago

If compute power is the only thing that matters, we do not live in a simulation. The best computer we can hope to build in the future will only have a minute fraction of the compute power of reality. Simulating reality on that computer will either be a tiny reality, or a much lower fidelity reality. If you find yourself alive, likely you live where there is the most compute power, therefor, base reality. Especially since we have zero indicators that any part of our reality is "fake". Think about a character in the Sims, it would never be able to understand the mechanism by which its arm moves, if it understood its world completely. Because those movements are part of the simulator, not part of the simulated world. Arm movement is not an emergent effect. Our reality however is based on atoms. Or quantum fields if you want to go deeper. And maybe some kind of cellular automata behind that. If evolution had a purpose, we can detect an upwards line in complexity, and we must conclude it is unlikely we humans are the end station. Probably we will create self replicating intelligent machines that can colonize space. Emotional meat bags are not very suitable ...

hathawsh 10y ago
Reality in the universe one level up could be different in such a way that it is more conducive to creation of virtual universes. Our idea of reality could be a mere shadow of what others think of as reality.
- ozy 10y ago
  From our universe, and simulations we can create, and simulations in there, etc. it holds. It is interesting to think that an outside universe could be so different it does not hold going up to base reality. But that implies that logic, math, and computability, are different there. That is not very likely, though ultimately unknowable to us. Literally "a mere shadow of what others think of as reality" implies that that universe has a lot more compute. Therefor with much higher probability you would have evolved directly in their universe, on some tiny pinhead, or in a corner of their universe, not in a simulation they create, no matter how many they create.

danielam 10y ago

Lots of muddled thinking, but some good points and a good start. There are a couple of things in particular that I think are interesting and worth drawing attention to. None of these are religious ideas per se; they are philosophical. The first is the the idea of telos. Telos in the philosophical sense refers to that toward which something is ordered. It is frequently misunderstood as something identical with conscious intent, but it has nothing to do with such intent per se, only with what may be called the causal structure of a thing. For example, when I say that a heart is ordered toward pumping blood through the circulatory system, I am not speaking of conscious purposes. I am speaking of the way in which the heart is structured and the way it functions and to what end it functions. Indeed, without telos, we could not explain efficient causality. We could not explain why hearts tend to pump blood instead of, say, materializing elephants or playing the Dies Irae of Mozart's requiem. Even biologists who strive to suppress talk of telos inevitably resort to teleological language like "function". Sometimes such terminology is dismissed as only metaphorical, but such dismissals are flippant and do not pass closer examination. After all, if a term is metaphorical, then you have to ask what the metaphor stands for. Deny teleological language and biology ceases to make sense. The reason teleology has been a difficult thing to digest has largely to do with the mechanistic turn in philosophy that has seeped deeply into ideas about science. Notice how popular debates between atheistic, materialist proponents and theistic, dualist opponents of evolution typically center on the probability of something as complex as life arising without a mind to have caused it. Paley's ghost haunts the discussion. The reason is that both the opponents and proponents of evolution in these debates hold to a mechanistic, Cartesian metaphysics where teleology is conceived of as extrinsically imposed by a divine intellect and now something intrinsic to things in themselves. Of course, the proponent will deny the divine intellect, just as he will deny the immaterial Cartesian mind, but he will not have not escaped the metaphysics altogether. This metaphysics has causes a proliferation of problems in philosophy that admit no solutions. However, it is a mistake to think that this metaphysics is the old contender. There is a small but vibrant revival of Aristotelean metaphysics under way and with it comes a "revival" of teleology.

danielam 10y ago
Sorry, had to run. Errata: "The first is the idea of telos." "conceived of as extrinsically imposed by a divine intellect and not something intrinsic to things" "he will not have escaped" "This metaphysics has caused a proliferation" "this metaphysics is the only contender"

tokenadult 10y ago

The response from Jerry Coyne, a professor of biology who has literally written the book about evolution, is definitive. https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/robert-wright-in-the-nyt-evolution-could-have-a-higher-purpose/ https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/12/13/robert-w...