From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Sep 04 1999 - 21:40:33 MDT
(I'm re-forwarding this to the list - I sent it on Wednesday but it
didn't get there.)
attached mail follows:
> Robert Bradbury writes:
> >Humans have been selected to be about two things: survival & reproduction.
And yet, we aren't fitness-maximizers, but adaptation-executors, to
paraphrase Cosmides and Tooby (from _The Adaptive Mind_ - thanks, Paul
Hughes!). We are the sum of our adaptations, and are under no
obligation to maximize our fitness. Thus the contraceptive, for example.
We are the sum of our adaptations, and one of those adaptations stands
out from all the others - it's the adaptation of reasoning, of
representing the logic and contents of the Universe, of believing what's
true. In the end this is the only meaningful adaptation; all the others
being but shadows of the ancestral environment, causes without goals,
mere programs that can become obsolete in an instant with a change of context.
To believe what is true is also the only meaningful adaptation in a
greater sense, because, when combined with the adaptation - not
fitness-maximizing behavior, but *adaptation* - that allows us to direct
our actions through purposes, formulate subgoals based on cognitive
content rather than instinct, it yields the impulse to *do what is
right*. And despite failure, and misguided actions, and all the other
obstacles, sometimes that impulse *does* cause something right to come about.
Thus the pattern that is a human - though evolved by a causal process
with no concern for truth or right - may come to reflect the logic of
the Universe, and perhaps even to serve the unknown ultimate ends of
existence; if, of course, any exist.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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