X-Message-Number: 11482 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: various matters raised by Cryonets 11476 to 11481 Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 00:15:04 +1000 (EST) Hi everyone! To Rand Simberg: I should have chosen my words better. Evolution WORKS on individuals, not groups. In the sense that the individuals of one generation have been "worked on" more than their ancestors, evolution has "benefited" them. Note the "". You are quite right that evolution does not proceed to the benefit of anyone or any thing, if "benefit" is defined by that person or thing. If the result of evolution is assumed to be a benefit, then we benefit from it as individuals.... but you are quite correct in pointing out that our idea of benefit may differ markedly from the effect of evolution. An interesting example of just that comes from recent human evolution; apparently the brain size of modern humans is somewhat smaller, on average, than that of Cro-Magnon man... though I doubt that anyone would think that to be an advance. This bears on Mike Perry's ideas, also. Evolution is a force like the force of gravity, and like the force of gravity does not in itself benefit anyone. However it (virtually) always acts on INDIVIDUALS. This means a lot when you think about it: it is because it acts on individuals that one species can give rise to another (so it cannot be said to act on species). The same may be said of groups. It generally acts not directly by death but by changing the individuals produced in the next generation. Up to recently, most people died at a time way below the lifespans we now consider normal. We have changed this so that we run into such things as old age, which is not itself the result of direct evolution but simply the result of living past the time evolution has given us a program for. Old age is not a sign of evolution working, but almost the reverse: it's a sign that we now live longer than our previous evolution has prepared us for. As I said in my previous message, this suggests that we are now under evolutionary pressure to live longer --- not that such pressure will benefit anyone now living. To Bob and others: I have not yet read Kurzweil's book, but certainly plan to do so. However neither thinking speed nor storage capacity so far seem to be parameters on which human beings have been optimized by their past evolution. This means to me that neither parameter may do much for our survival. We HAVE been optimized to use and build tools, and computers are great tools, providing speed and storage capacity whenever we find we need them. And after all, they're already faster than us in doing what we program them to do, and probably many computers have greater storage capacity already than our brains. But as tools they are extensions of us, not independent creatures. Even more than that, to understand how our own brains work some scientists have already produced computer models of particular algorithms our brains may use. Sometimes these provide good models, sometimes not --- as recent work has shown. As for finding better ways to INTERFACE with our tools (yes, our hands and eyes, even now, have turned out to work pretty well), we might well devise means to connect computers to our own brains, though that would be a much more difficult task than many people think. Then we too could think rapidly and recall things which we could not otherwise do, when we needed to do so. And we could also put the tool down when we did NOT need to do so --- a major advantage of tools over specialized bodies or specialized brains. And tools do expand us far more than any static change, since what we need changes constantly. As for actually making an independent computer with a personality etc, that requires much more than a computer. It requires a body, too, and somehow that body must be provided with wants and drives, and some ability to obtain what it wants. Moreover, Turing or not, it also will require a brain of a certain structure, not a general computing device at all (our own brains are very highly parallel; we do not notice this immediately mainly because those parts of which we're explicitly conscious work sequentially, acting as a general guide to all the processes beneath them). To do well, it must also incorporate a good deal of self-repair capacity for its body and even for its brain (that is something we have not yet worked out how to do for our computers at all --- no matter how fast and how much storage capacity we may give them). There is much more to human beings than simple computing speed or storage capacity. Anyone who has in mind the task of making an "intelligent" self-aware computer should first consider just how our evolution has optimized US. I do not mean that we are the end of evolution, far from it, nor that we cannot improve ourselves. But before anyone wants to think about how we can improve ourselves, they would do well to think carefully about what will really be an improvement. As for those interested in Free Will: what we do is always caused, and in that sense others may say that we have no free will. But then those causes need not be restricted to external ones with which we disagree, like the feelings of a slave. If no one forces you to marry a particular woman, or man, and you feel that you want to marry that person, then your actions may be caused, but that does not mean that the causes cannot come from within yourself. So just what importance does this lack of Free Will really have? Finally, to Bob: A lot may depend on what you mean by a symbol, but ultimately our thinking cannot depend on symbols. It will depend on our perceptions, activities, and thoughts, but at a root level none of these actually is a symbol. Not even DNA. (No one declared that the DNA for a particular gene "stands for" or "symbolizes" anything: it is a part of our machinery that produces RNA and thus protein). The essential feature of a SYMBOL is that its relation to what it symbolizes has a large amount of arbitrariness. At the lowest level, we do not operate with symbols --- symbols come later, at higher levels. Even more, as machinery, at the lowest level we CANNOT operate with symbols. Best and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11482