From: Martin Striz (mstriz@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Apr 11 2006 - 23:15:20 MDT
On 4/11/06, J. Andrew Rogers <andrew@ceruleansystems.com> wrote:
>
> On Apr 11, 2006, at 7:31 PM, Martin Striz wrote:
> Evolution has no goals, but it also tends to explore its local space
> pretty thoroughly. Capabilities with very high ROI that are
> trivially discovered by random walks are things I expect to see
> sooner rather than later. That is why it is strange. In case you
> have not been paying attention, biology tends to exploit every tiny
> sliver of efficiency it accidentally implements with ruthless abandon.
>
> If evolution is driven by fitness functions, why would you not expect
> it to find and exploit a cheap capability that can generate very
> significant improvements in fitness?
Of course. The question is /whether/ a particular feature is
adaptive, cognitive capacities included. You thought it would be
strange not to exploit the capabilities of neural ensembles. There
are lots of potential capabilities that just aren't adaptive in the
living world, like doing matrix algebra on the fly or modeling
four-dimensional hypercubes. That's what I was pointing out.
Martin
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