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The need to reproduce is more fundamental, and there are plenty of examples in nature of animals sacrificing homeostasis in order to reproduce -- male black wid
by pjscott 14y ago
The need to reproduce is more fundamental, and there are plenty of examples in nature of animals sacrificing homeostasis in order to reproduce -- male black widow spiders, for example. It's obvious why this would be the case; that's how evolution works. Keeping your future options open is a nice heuristic, but it's not necessarily an end goal.
- snowwrestler 14y agoReproducing captures more future states than not reproducing, since it allows some of your collected information to extend past your death.
- Houshalter 14y agoYou can explain almost any process with this theory, and that's why it's useless. Trying to "capture more future states" is not the reason certain traits evolve, they evolve simply because they are more likely to survive and reproduce.
- snowwrestler 14y agoWhy any living thing reproduces at all is a much more fundamental question than e.g. why men have nipples or snakes don't have legs.
- Houshalter 14y agoBecause things that do reproduce quickly out-reproduce and out-compete things that don't.
- SittingDuck 14y agoNot exactly: there are things that work quite well with these ideas, and others don't. Check out my comments about "empowerment" further above for examples. Thus, the authors' proposals are emphatically not vacuous - but they are probably not that new, either, if I have properly understood what they are doing. Disclaimer: I am one of the authors of the empowerment papers.