How Goals Work
Evolution crafts organisms with specific goals. Always, they revolve around a variable called inclusive fitness. Subgoals of inclusive fitness include ability to survive, obtain food, mate, and (sometimes) protect offspring and engage in evolution-mediated reciprocal altruism. In humans, the subgoals blossom into a peacock-tail-like phantasmagoria of music, art, ornamentation, intellectual pursuits, yadda yadda. Still, these are all spinoffs of inclusive fitness.
Inclusive fitness according to Earthly life is a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny subset of all information-theoretically possible goal systems. The Hamming distance between Earthly life's goals and goals of biota on another planet may be huge. This phenomenon magnifies itself when you have intelligence that can formulate its own goals and rearrange its evolutionary goals into arbitrary permutations.
Heard of the concept of a limit? When a certain goalset is implemented at the limit, totalistic things happen. For instance, if you were to implement a rabbit genome's goalset to the limit, most of the terrestrial biomass on planet Earth would be converted into copies of rabbits. Ditto with practically every other animal. Animals are basically just robots manipulated by long DNA molecules, anyway.
When we can produce arbitrary goalsets and back them up with optimization pressure equivalent or exceeding that exerted by Homo sapiens, it's usually called "bad". Yet within the next century, we'll likely create one that we consider "harmless".
May 27th, 2008 - 13:57
FIRST!
More seriously, I’m not sure I like this application of a mathematical limit as reflecting the principle involved. A limit is simply something that can be approached but never *quite* reached.
This is probably a moot point. I dunno.
May 27th, 2008 - 14:31
It is a moot point. -.-
May 27th, 2008 - 14:46
Was just tryin’ to contribute to the conversation… :)
May 27th, 2008 - 23:59
From the standpoint of natural selection, surviving, eating, mating, and such are mere subgoals to the supergoal of inclusive fitness. But the organisms themselves don’t care about fitness at all. “Adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers“!
Maybe you could argue that the rabbit-genome goalset implemented to the limit would result in a planet covered in rabbits (although I would argue that it would be a planet covered in rabbit DNA–as far as selfish genes go, the animal itself but a means to an end, as you note). But the goalset of an actual rabbit only makes reference to that rabbit having food, sex, warmth, and the like.
May 28th, 2008 - 17:33
Subgoals of inclusive fitness include ability to survive, obtain food, mate, and (sometimes) protect offspring.
Not to nit pick, but these would all be goals that lead to direct fitness. Inclusive fitness is Hamilton’s idea that you protect non-offspring relatives, because on average they carry some of your genes. The fitness metric is more inclusive than just reproductive output.
May 28th, 2008 - 21:51
Good points, I’ll change wording to reflect these comments.