--- On Wed, 7/2/08, William Pearson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Evolution! I'm not saying your way can't work, just > saying why I short > cut where I do. Note a thing has a purpose if it is useful > to apply > the design stance* to it. There are two things to > differentiate > between, having a purpose and having some feedback of a > purpose built > in to the system.
I don't believe evolution has a purpose. See Hod Lipson's TED talk for an intriguing experiment in which replication is an inevitable outcome for a system of building blocks explicitly set up in a random fashion. In other words, purpose is emergent and ultimately in the mind of the beholder. See this article for an interesting take that increasing complexity is a property of our laws of thermodynamics for non-equilibrium systems: http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050142&ct=1 In other words, Darwinian evolution is a special case of a more basic kind of selection based on the laws of physics. This would deprive evolution of any notion of purpose. > It is the second I meant, I should have been more specific. > That is to > apply the intentional stance to something successfully, I > think a > sense of its own purpose is needed to be embedded in that > entity (this > may only be a very crude approximation to the purpose we > might assign > something looking from an evolution eye view). Specifying a system's goals is limiting in the sense that we don't force the agent to construct its own goals based on it own constructions. In other words, this is just a different way of creating an ontology. It narrows the domain of applicability. That may be exactly what you want to do, but for AGI researchers, it is a mistake. > Also your way we will end up with entities that may not be > useful to > us, which I think of as a negative for a long costly > research program. > > Will Usefulness, again, is in the eye of the beholder. What appears not useful today may be absolutely critical to an evolved descendant. This is a popular explanation for how diversity emerges in nature, that a virus or bacteria does some kind of horizontal transfer of its genes into a host genome, and that gene becomes the basis for a future adaptation. When William Burroughs said language is a virus, he may have been more correct than he knew. :-] Terren ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=106510220-47b225 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
