Evolution isn’t even defined by making better replicators really. A replicator that is too effective at replicating can dissolve its environment and destroy the conditions that made its existence possible.
That’s called a bad replicator for the purpose of this discussion, because destroying the conditions that are required for its own replication to continue is not conducive to replication and therefore a replicator that does that is bad.
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.
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’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 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.
That’s called a bad replicator for the purpose of this discussion, because destroying the conditions that are required for its own replication to continue is not conducive to replication and therefore a replicator that does that is bad.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.