From: Wei Dai (weidai@weidai.com)
Date: Thu Sep 26 2002 - 01:13:30 MDT
On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 11:13:21AM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
> However I can't believe that this is universally true; I think there are
> at least some people who truly do care about these things. It may well be
> that the evolutionary reason they care is so that they are more successful
> at reproduction, but that doesn't change the fact that they truly care.
> They are not deceiving themselves. They would pursue science or art
> even if no one else existed in the world, because evolution has so fully
> internalized their motivations. But maybe these people are the exception.
I think Robin's position is that people do truly care about art and
science, but they are deceived into believing that they care more about
these things than they really do, and also deceived about why they care.
BTW, Robin references Geoffrey Miller's book _The Mating Mind_. Miller has
a nice chapter-by-chapter summary of the book at
http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000137/#html.
> I also suggested to Robin another analogy between our situation and
> that of The Matrix. In the movie, humans had made a big mistake in
> creating AIs, because the AIs turned against them and eventually took
> over the world. In the same way, genes have in a sense made a big
> mistake in creating large brains. The brains are going to take over the
> world and make the genes irrelevant. At best the genes have set us on
> a developmental path, and similarly no doubt the humans set the AIs on
> some particular trajectory through their own development space. But
> ultimately the genes have lost control; the shape of the future will
> be determined by brains.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing though? Robin essentially argues that
we have art and science today because we reproduce sexually, and it
happened that doing art and science were good ways to display one's
cognitive abilities to potential mates. Suppose brains gain control over
genes, so we no longer have to reproduce sexually (e.g., we can clone
ourselves asexually, or copy ourselves as software). Then the sexual
selection component of the evolutionary pressure to care about art and
science disappears. Will what's left be sufficient to preserve and expand
our interests in them, considering their substantial costs?
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