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

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