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Just one comment on a minute quote from Penrose that happened to be in the article: "To my way of thinking there is still something mysterious about evolution,

Just one comment on a minute quote from Penrose that happened to be in the article: "To my way of thinking there is still something mysterious about evolution, with its apparent 'groping' towards some future purpose. Things at least seem to organize themselves somewhat better than they 'ought' to, just on the basis of blind-chance evolution and natural selection." This is a common fallacy about evolution, and is explained beautifully by the anthropic principle, or in other words, the innate selection bias of our existence. We've self-selected for our own awareness of our circumstance and existence. Things are not organizing better than they "ought" to, they've just happened to organize to a sufficient point that we exist and perceive this process and say things about it like the above quote. It is in the same way that someone who wins the lottery must think themselves exceedingly lucky that they, of all the millions of people participating, have won. They must think there is something mysterious about this, that things turned out somewhat better than they 'ought' to, just on the basis of blind chance. Yet, what is the probability that some person, of the entire pool of people in the world, wins the lottery? One. It has necessarily happened by the nature of the lottery. We as a species have won this lottery, by the mere nature of our sentience. We should not think it mysterious or unusual in any way. However, we are lucky in the sense that we are here; we are special in that we can perceive and understand. As long as we understand the fact that there is no "should" in evolution, this is a perfectly fine thought. it just happened, and on this planet, it produced something able to understand itself. As Carl Sagan said, "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." Certainly there is much metaphysical and philosophical consequence to our existence, but scientifically and probabilistically speaking, it makes perfect sense. Consequently, I believe it may be much more difficult to reach true AI than some have postulated.

Evbn 14y ago
Yes. The only mystery is how the universe got here, and if you want to get super metaphysical, why math and logic work at all. Evolution as a process is entirely reasonable when you look at the details if the logic.
ehsanu1 14y ago
This is a common fallacy about evolution, and is explained beautifully by the anthropic principle, or in other words, the innate selection bias of our existence. I'm a little confused about how the anthropic principle explains this fallacy (and it is a fallacy to be sure). I guess you're referring to how natural selection (and all the other sorts of selection that occur regularly) lead to the existence of "appropriate" organisms and features. But I think knowing some of the actual details in how evolution works at all the different levels (molecular bio, epigenetics, competition/cooperation, behavior, etc, etc, etc) serves as an even better explanation. Here's a 25 lecture course from Stanford that explains just that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA
- calinet6 14y ago
  Absolutely, but Penrose was a brilliant man; he surely understood the biological and scientific explanations of it all. Yet, he still held some mysterious belief that there was something magical about the process. This belief comes from the self-selection bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias) (NOTE: not natural selection or evolutionary selection; there's a conflict of terms between probability theory and biology there—sorry for the confusion) I spoke of, and many people share it. From our individual perspective, or even from a human-wide perspective (which are the ones most familiar to all of us) we appear extremely special, extremely lucky to exist at all; to have been in the right place at the right time to undergo this process of evolution. The anthropic principle simply invalidates this mystery: it is not special, it simply happened, and because it happened, we exist to observe it. It doesn't care to explain evolution in any biological or scientific way; it only seeks to remove all doubt that it was able to happen at all.
- FreakLegion 14y ago
  I'm going to take a few seconds here to be a pedant and disentangle the structure of an argument from its contents. Strictly speaking, a fallacy is a defect in the structure of an argument, i.e. in the logic that connects a premise to a conclusion. What you and the parent have identified is simply a false premise ("Things at least seem to organize themselves somewhat better than they 'ought' to"[1]). A false premise may result in the wrong conclusion, but an argument can be wrong without being fallacious. This distinction isn't so much relevant here, but it comes in handy when you want to pinpoint sources of disagreement in a discussion. Lobbing the f-word around (even when deserved) just makes people defensive. 1. Of course the argument used to derive this premise might be fallacious, but that argument isn't given.
Xcelerate 14y ago
I disagree. You say that "Things are not organizing better than they 'ought to, they've just happened to organize to a sufficient point that we exist and perceive this process and say things about it". Let's assume we are but one of an infinite path of possibilities for slightly different starting conditions of a universe. When you get to this magnitude of combinations, it is no longer sufficient to compare individual combinations -- rather it is infinite sets that make the most sense to compare -- classes of possible universes in a sense. You are comparing cardinalities, not members of the different sets themselves. And if you think about all of the possibilities, it is almost certain (borrowing the mathematical usage of that term) that our universe is unlike almost all combinations, and to a significant degree. I could be wrong here, but it is certainly something that could be proven (or disproven) by an expert mathematician. So, when you say we won a lottery, I think it is instead more like you threw a dart at a real number line between 0 and 1 and the dart landed exactly on 0.4. It's not impossible, but the probability of that happening is still 0. (Those two statements are actually not incompatible. There's a good question on the math stack exchange about it).
- jlgreco 14y ago
  What calinet6 is saying is that the reason you think "it is almost certain (borrowing the mathematical usage of that term) that our universe is unlike almost all combinations, and to a significant degree" is because this is the world that you live in. That makes it seem like some sort of special case from all the other innumerable possibilities. In reality the only special thing about it is that it is the one that happened to happen.
  - Xcelerate 14y ago
    What I'm saying with my argument is that the odds that we ended up in a "set" of universes similar to ours is exactly 0. (Which does not make it impossible.) If the odds are 0, then it seems more reasonable that there is a better, more probable explanation that the universe is the way it is than chance. It's not based on what I want to believe, or even something from self-selection bias. It is something that can be calculated and either proven true or false, probably with set theory of some kind.
drostie 14y ago
It is worth noticing that Dennett, while not taking Penrose out of context per se, is using him to illustrate a much narrower point than you're making -- and your quote of him therefore does take Penrose out of context. He continues that quote by saying, "It may well be that such appearances are quite deceptive. There seems to be something about the way that the laws of physics work, which allows natural selection to be a much more effective process than it would be with just arbitrary laws." Penrose's point is that natural selection seems to have capitalized on a specific physical feature which can do something better than any computer can -- this he finds quite remarkable, and he is expressing skepticism that, if you just leave a genetic algorithm for a while with an arbitrary weighting function, that it will develop structures which start to reach towards such logic puzzles with curiosity and form proofs of them. That we have done this is not testament to the anthropic principle nearly as much as it is testament to the fact that, among all the animals, we seem to have most cleanly decoupled our logical intuitions and applied them to our problems.

Evbn 14y ago

Yes. The only mystery is how the universe got here, and if you want to get super metaphysical, why math and logic work at all. Evolution as a process is entirely reasonable when you look at the details if the logic.

ehsanu1 14y ago

This is a common fallacy about evolution, and is explained beautifully by the anthropic principle, or in other words, the innate selection bias of our existence. I'm a little confused about how the anthropic principle explains this fallacy (and it is a fallacy to be sure). I guess you're referring to how natural selection (and all the other sorts of selection that occur regularly) lead to the existence of "appropriate" organisms and features. But I think knowing some of the actual details in how evolution works at all the different levels (molecular bio, epigenetics, competition/cooperation, behavior, etc, etc, etc) serves as an even better explanation. Here's a 25 lecture course from Stanford that explains just that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

calinet6 14y ago
Absolutely, but Penrose was a brilliant man; he surely understood the biological and scientific explanations of it all. Yet, he still held some mysterious belief that there was something magical about the process. This belief comes from the self-selection bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias) (NOTE: not natural selection or evolutionary selection; there's a conflict of terms between probability theory and biology there—sorry for the confusion) I spoke of, and many people share it. From our individual perspective, or even from a human-wide perspective (which are the ones most familiar to all of us) we appear extremely special, extremely lucky to exist at all; to have been in the right place at the right time to undergo this process of evolution. The anthropic principle simply invalidates this mystery: it is not special, it simply happened, and because it happened, we exist to observe it. It doesn't care to explain evolution in any biological or scientific way; it only seeks to remove all doubt that it was able to happen at all.
FreakLegion 14y ago
I'm going to take a few seconds here to be a pedant and disentangle the structure of an argument from its contents. Strictly speaking, a fallacy is a defect in the structure of an argument, i.e. in the logic that connects a premise to a conclusion. What you and the parent have identified is simply a false premise ("Things at least seem to organize themselves somewhat better than they 'ought' to"[1]). A false premise may result in the wrong conclusion, but an argument can be wrong without being fallacious. This distinction isn't so much relevant here, but it comes in handy when you want to pinpoint sources of disagreement in a discussion. Lobbing the f-word around (even when deserved) just makes people defensive. 1. Of course the argument used to derive this premise might be fallacious, but that argument isn't given.

Xcelerate 14y ago

I disagree. You say that "Things are not organizing better than they 'ought to, they've just happened to organize to a sufficient point that we exist and perceive this process and say things about it". Let's assume we are but one of an infinite path of possibilities for slightly different starting conditions of a universe. When you get to this magnitude of combinations, it is no longer sufficient to compare individual combinations -- rather it is infinite sets that make the most sense to compare -- classes of possible universes in a sense. You are comparing cardinalities, not members of the different sets themselves. And if you think about all of the possibilities, it is almost certain (borrowing the mathematical usage of that term) that our universe is unlike almost all combinations, and to a significant degree. I could be wrong here, but it is certainly something that could be proven (or disproven) by an expert mathematician. So, when you say we won a lottery, I think it is instead more like you threw a dart at a real number line between 0 and 1 and the dart landed exactly on 0.4. It's not impossible, but the probability of that happening is still 0. (Those two statements are actually not incompatible. There's a good question on the math stack exchange about it).

jlgreco 14y ago
What calinet6 is saying is that the reason you think "it is almost certain (borrowing the mathematical usage of that term) that our universe is unlike almost all combinations, and to a significant degree" is because this is the world that you live in. That makes it seem like some sort of special case from all the other innumerable possibilities. In reality the only special thing about it is that it is the one that happened to happen.
- Xcelerate 14y ago
  What I'm saying with my argument is that the odds that we ended up in a "set" of universes similar to ours is exactly 0. (Which does not make it impossible.) If the odds are 0, then it seems more reasonable that there is a better, more probable explanation that the universe is the way it is than chance. It's not based on what I want to believe, or even something from self-selection bias. It is something that can be calculated and either proven true or false, probably with set theory of some kind.

drostie 14y ago

It is worth noticing that Dennett, while not taking Penrose out of context per se, is using him to illustrate a much narrower point than you're making -- and your quote of him therefore does take Penrose out of context. He continues that quote by saying, "It may well be that such appearances are quite deceptive. There seems to be something about the way that the laws of physics work, which allows natural selection to be a much more effective process than it would be with just arbitrary laws." Penrose's point is that natural selection seems to have capitalized on a specific physical feature which can do something better than any computer can -- this he finds quite remarkable, and he is expressing skepticism that, if you just leave a genetic algorithm for a while with an arbitrary weighting function, that it will develop structures which start to reach towards such logic puzzles with curiosity and form proofs of them. That we have done this is not testament to the anthropic principle nearly as much as it is testament to the fact that, among all the animals, we seem to have most cleanly decoupled our logical intuitions and applied them to our problems.