If good replicator is just being defined as personally producing a whole bunch of offspring, then I think it’s just not a helpful term. A good replicator should be something that replicates effectively, not just a lot, and what you are describing as “less effective at replication” is clearly more effective at replication relatively speaking if its offspring are still around and its competitors are not. You would hardly say something is a good replicator if it produced an unfathomable amount of offspring and then just ate them all, right?
I’m also saying that replication isn’t essential to the self-maintaining process on the individual level
How is this relevant? No one was contradicting this idea, even implicitly, it’s just not a meaningful factor in the discussion for the reason you go on to note.
If good replicator is just being defined as personally producing a whole bunch of offspring, then I think it’s just not a helpful term.
They phrased it by less and more offspring and I quoted it as such. If you want to argue that’s not what they said and take beef with my post as a result that’s fine. If you want to define a good replicator as one that can continue replicating over time, thats OK too (and I would agree with that) but again I think it’s attributional and not essential.
How is this relevant? No one was contradicting this idea, even implicitly, it’s just not a meaningful factor in the discussion for the reason you go on to note.
But evolution itself doesn’t “want” anything. It just has directionality towards making better replicators. The appearance that replicators (like genes) “want” to survive enough to pass on their code (in other words: to replicate) is just an emergent property of the fact that things that are better able to replicate in a given environment will replicate more than things that are less able to replicate in that environment. When did that simple mathematical fact, how replication efficiency works, get turned into a genuine desire to survive?
This does seem to imply replication as the fundamental function of an autopoietic process, at least to me, and that’s what I was referencing. All I was trying to get at is that the appearance of “wanting” to survive, as the original poster put it, isn’t related to replication, and the attribution of the desire to live as something imposed by and the result of evolution is inaccurate because it’s a direct extension of autopoiesis essential to the organism which exists prior to evolutionary (and replicatory) processes. I think this has direct implications for the development of real intelligence in an AI system. I’m not going to reply after this because I don’t think I’m explaining my perspective well and I don’t want to argue anymore. It’s just a quibble on ontology, anyway, because I mostly agree with their post and I thought it was well written and thought out.
This does seem to imply replication as the fundamental function of an autopoietic process, at least to me, and that’s what I was referencing
Maybe I’m just reading it wrong, but it looks to me like it’s all about how selection pressures produce traits seen in individuals because them having those traits is better for the survival of the species.
All I was trying to get at is that the appearance of “wanting” to survive, as the original poster put it, isn’t related to replication, and the attribution of the desire to live as something imposed by and the result of evolution is inaccurate because it’s a direct extension of autopoiesis essential to the organism which exists prior to evolutionary (and replicatory) processes.
I don’t think amoeba “want” to live, they just do things toward the end of surviving to replicate, with no awareness of anything. It’s like machine learning, it’s just a system of reactions that ended up being self-perpetuating via survival and reproduction. That’s the essential element, and having any sort of “will” is far, far downstream of that.
Wanting to live is caused by replication because it was developed out of these systems in response to selection pressures.
I don’t think amoeba “want” to live, they just do things toward the end of surviving to replicate
Yeah, that distinction is probably where we’re differing I think. To me the end is surviving and replication is a means for that. But no that “want” isn’t any sort of “will”.
although you could point to the sensory and navigational abilities of predatory amoeba as a kind of awareness and therefore a “consciousness” in some way, or go down the panpsychic rabbithole, but I don’t really believe in either of those things. Its just protosemiosis versus semiosis or model-free versus model-based to me. Conscious experience as bayesian belief dynamics and predictive inference for perception and action or whatever
I’m a total philistine, half of the words you said just passed over my head, I just don’t see anything fundamentally different between amoebas and an electronic light sensor or a roomba or whatever. Certain inputs produce certain outputs, and things like whether it’s chemical or mechanical or anything else is immaterial. You may as well tell me that every massive object “wants” to move toward other massive objects in proportion to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them. The fact that one perpetuates an organism’s existence and the other isn’t is purely incidental and I think you’re effectively projecting a teleology onto it by saying that these reactions by means of which an organism maintains itself are, by that very fact, evidence of a “want.”
I’m a total philistine, half of the words you said just passed over my head
Dork gibberish, not important. Although you should look it up if you’re ever bored, it’s interesting stuff
I just don’t see anything fundamentally different between amoebas and an electronic light sensor or a roomba or whatever
The fact that one perpetuates an organism’s existence and the other isn’t is purely incidental
I think that’s kind of the central difference to me at least. It’s the self maintenance of the tension between the internal and external by reproduction of its component parts that do kinda be what distinguishes life and organisms from mechanistic objects. as you say, whether it’s chemical or mechanical or electrical doesn’t really matter.
I think you’re effectively projecting a teleology onto it by saying that these reactions by means of which an organism maintains itself are, by that very fact, evidence of a “want.”
Uhhhh well kinda yeah. (Not a cognitive “want” btw, but it is sublated into the cognitive want. Like the OP puts it, the directionality that forms the preawareness “want”, that is later identified with the experiential want post-awareness. But even further back before that, and even prior to the evolutionary process.) It’s the circle that presupposes its own end like Hegel talks about. It’s self-referential. Some authors say that’s not teleological and some do, I’d say it’s teleological, but that’s just me. On some level you can say that it’s just reactive processes but then at the level of operation of the whole system it does gain real significance beyond its appearance as such due to its autonomy and closure from the surrounding world. There’s a direct throughline between this “want” on the level of a single cell, as in the constant bringing forth of what it lacks for its own continuation, and things like the special process of reproduction, cognition, experience, self-awareness, and social processes. And even lower below the organism, dissipative structures. Systems constantly implementing themselves as their ends at every level of self-organization. It’s just… dialectics. I’m probably not giving a good account of this perspective because I’m not much of a writer or communicator, and I’ve probably misrepresented some things. You could say I’m just splitting hairs about semantics. I guess that’s true too.
I think that’s kind of the central difference to me at least. It’s the self maintenance of the tension between the internal and external by reproduction of its component parts that do kinda be what distinguishes life and organisms from mechanistic objects. as you say, whether it’s chemical or mechanical or electrical doesn’t really matter.
But that’s a statement about the ultimate consequences of what happens, which doesn’t tell us almost anything about the proximate nature of the actions. That’s what I mean by “projecting a teleology.” Consider a mutant amoeba that does something not conducive to self-maintenance, there is nothing inherently different about the nature of those actions as biological processes, it requires a zoomed-out view to explain normal amoebas as conforming to selection pressures and this mutated behavior as deviating from selection pressures. “But the amoeba dies!” Yes, but the event of the death later on is not useful for explaining the fundamental nature of the action itself, the death is a distant, emergent consequence of the action, an event distinct from the action (as is successful replication, and even more so with the “event” of surviving past that point in the future). You’re using teleological reasoning to make some sort of metaphysical claim about events and organisms that fundamentally don’t make sense from a materialist perspective.
There’s a direct throughline between . . . the constant bringing forth of what it lacks for its own continuation, and things like the special process of reproduction, cognition, experience, self-awareness, and social processes.
This, as I have abridged it, is completely true. The issue is that the “want” is just a metaphysical, teleological complication that doesn’t help us understand anything and just serves to mystify a mechanical/chemical/electrical process that is already entirely understandable.
It’s just… dialectics
Right, it is dialectics. The problem is that it’s Hegelian dialectics, which is highly teleological and idealist, and not material dialectics.
The problem is that it’s Hegelian dialectics, which is highly teleological and idealist, and not material dialectics.
it’s not Hegelian dialectics just because I quoted Hegel, but you keep misrepresenting what I have to say so I’m not going to keep effortposting on this, which I should have done when I said I would earlier. You can read authors on autopoietic theory and systems thinking like Varela or Friston if you want. It’s a completely material dialectical analysis and not “teleological” in the way you’re referring to. It’s just self-referential.
You’re conflating ultimate causes and proximate causes. It’s just an extremely elementary mistake in understanding behavior. I didn’t call it Hegelian on the basis that you mentioning Hegel was evidence (though that did help me make the connection), I called it Hegelian because it has the same ethos of the end existing inside each step of the process, drawing the process along intrinsically, which you cannot claim this theory of “want” is not.
It’s no different than saying massive bodies want to be near each other (prioritized in terms of mass1 x mass2 / distance) because they keep exerting force that trends toward that outcome. It’s no different than saying that liquids “want” to hold together, they just don’t want it very strongly, or that rivers “want” to erode shorelines. With base organisms, it’s just input -> output, and the function processing them was created by selection pressures, but there is nothing distinguishing the actual actions on a proximate level from ones that are ultimately self-destructive, because the self-destruction only happens later and on that basis, with no further information being required, cannot be used for establishing what was going on inside the base organism at a proximate level to cause the output.
If good replicator is just being defined as personally producing a whole bunch of offspring, then I think it’s just not a helpful term. A good replicator should be something that replicates effectively, not just a lot, and what you are describing as “less effective at replication” is clearly more effective at replication relatively speaking if its offspring are still around and its competitors are not. You would hardly say something is a good replicator if it produced an unfathomable amount of offspring and then just ate them all, right?
How is this relevant? No one was contradicting this idea, even implicitly, it’s just not a meaningful factor in the discussion for the reason you go on to note.
spoiler
They phrased it by less and more offspring and I quoted it as such. If you want to argue that’s not what they said and take beef with my post as a result that’s fine. If you want to define a good replicator as one that can continue replicating over time, thats OK too (and I would agree with that) but again I think it’s attributional and not essential.
This does seem to imply replication as the fundamental function of an autopoietic process, at least to me, and that’s what I was referencing. All I was trying to get at is that the appearance of “wanting” to survive, as the original poster put it, isn’t related to replication, and the attribution of the desire to live as something imposed by and the result of evolution is inaccurate because it’s a direct extension of autopoiesis essential to the organism which exists prior to evolutionary (and replicatory) processes. I think this has direct implications for the development of real intelligence in an AI system. I’m not going to reply after this because I don’t think I’m explaining my perspective well and I don’t want to argue anymore. It’s just a quibble on ontology, anyway, because I mostly agree with their post and I thought it was well written and thought out.
Maybe I’m just reading it wrong, but it looks to me like it’s all about how selection pressures produce traits seen in individuals because them having those traits is better for the survival of the species.
I don’t think amoeba “want” to live, they just do things toward the end of surviving to replicate, with no awareness of anything. It’s like machine learning, it’s just a system of reactions that ended up being self-perpetuating via survival and reproduction. That’s the essential element, and having any sort of “will” is far, far downstream of that.
Wanting to live is caused by replication because it was developed out of these systems in response to selection pressures.
spoiler
Yeah, that distinction is probably where we’re differing I think. To me the end is surviving and replication is a means for that. But no that “want” isn’t any sort of “will”.
although you could point to the sensory and navigational abilities of predatory amoeba as a kind of awareness and therefore a “consciousness” in some way, or go down the panpsychic rabbithole, but I don’t really believe in either of those things. Its just protosemiosis versus semiosis or model-free versus model-based to me. Conscious experience as bayesian belief dynamics and predictive inference for perception and action or whatever
I’m a total philistine, half of the words you said just passed over my head, I just don’t see anything fundamentally different between amoebas and an electronic light sensor or a roomba or whatever. Certain inputs produce certain outputs, and things like whether it’s chemical or mechanical or anything else is immaterial. You may as well tell me that every massive object “wants” to move toward other massive objects in proportion to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them. The fact that one perpetuates an organism’s existence and the other isn’t is purely incidental and I think you’re effectively projecting a teleology onto it by saying that these reactions by means of which an organism maintains itself are, by that very fact, evidence of a “want.”
spoiler
Dork gibberish, not important. Although you should look it up if you’re ever bored, it’s interesting stuff
I think that’s kind of the central difference to me at least. It’s the self maintenance of the tension between the internal and external by reproduction of its component parts that do kinda be what distinguishes life and organisms from mechanistic objects. as you say, whether it’s chemical or mechanical or electrical doesn’t really matter.
Uhhhh well kinda yeah. (Not a cognitive “want” btw, but it is sublated into the cognitive want. Like the OP puts it, the directionality that forms the preawareness “want”, that is later identified with the experiential want post-awareness. But even further back before that, and even prior to the evolutionary process.) It’s the circle that presupposes its own end like Hegel talks about. It’s self-referential. Some authors say that’s not teleological and some do, I’d say it’s teleological, but that’s just me. On some level you can say that it’s just reactive processes but then at the level of operation of the whole system it does gain real significance beyond its appearance as such due to its autonomy and closure from the surrounding world. There’s a direct throughline between this “want” on the level of a single cell, as in the constant bringing forth of what it lacks for its own continuation, and things like the special process of reproduction, cognition, experience, self-awareness, and social processes. And even lower below the organism, dissipative structures. Systems constantly implementing themselves as their ends at every level of self-organization. It’s just… dialectics. I’m probably not giving a good account of this perspective because I’m not much of a writer or communicator, and I’ve probably misrepresented some things. You could say I’m just splitting hairs about semantics. I guess that’s true too.
But that’s a statement about the ultimate consequences of what happens, which doesn’t tell us almost anything about the proximate nature of the actions. That’s what I mean by “projecting a teleology.” Consider a mutant amoeba that does something not conducive to self-maintenance, there is nothing inherently different about the nature of those actions as biological processes, it requires a zoomed-out view to explain normal amoebas as conforming to selection pressures and this mutated behavior as deviating from selection pressures. “But the amoeba dies!” Yes, but the event of the death later on is not useful for explaining the fundamental nature of the action itself, the death is a distant, emergent consequence of the action, an event distinct from the action (as is successful replication, and even more so with the “event” of surviving past that point in the future). You’re using teleological reasoning to make some sort of metaphysical claim about events and organisms that fundamentally don’t make sense from a materialist perspective.
This, as I have abridged it, is completely true. The issue is that the “want” is just a metaphysical, teleological complication that doesn’t help us understand anything and just serves to mystify a mechanical/chemical/electrical process that is already entirely understandable.
Right, it is dialectics. The problem is that it’s Hegelian dialectics, which is highly teleological and idealist, and not material dialectics.
spoiler
it’s not Hegelian dialectics just because I quoted Hegel, but you keep misrepresenting what I have to say so I’m not going to keep effortposting on this, which I should have done when I said I would earlier. You can read authors on autopoietic theory and systems thinking like Varela or Friston if you want. It’s a completely material dialectical analysis and not “teleological” in the way you’re referring to. It’s just self-referential.
You’re conflating ultimate causes and proximate causes. It’s just an extremely elementary mistake in understanding behavior. I didn’t call it Hegelian on the basis that you mentioning Hegel was evidence (though that did help me make the connection), I called it Hegelian because it has the same ethos of the end existing inside each step of the process, drawing the process along intrinsically, which you cannot claim this theory of “want” is not.
It’s no different than saying massive bodies want to be near each other (prioritized in terms of mass1 x mass2 / distance) because they keep exerting force that trends toward that outcome. It’s no different than saying that liquids “want” to hold together, they just don’t want it very strongly, or that rivers “want” to erode shorelines. With base organisms, it’s just input -> output, and the function processing them was created by selection pressures, but there is nothing distinguishing the actual actions on a proximate level from ones that are ultimately self-destructive, because the self-destruction only happens later and on that basis, with no further information being required, cannot be used for establishing what was going on inside the base organism at a proximate level to cause the output.