On Jun 7, 3:54 pm, "Stathis Papaioannou" <stath....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
> Evolution has not had a chance to take into account modern reproductive
> technologies, so we can easily defeat the goal "reproduce", and see the goal
> "feed" as only a means to the higher level goal "survive". However, *that*
> goal is very difficult to shake off. We take survival as somehow profoundly
> and self-evidently important, which it is, but only because we've been
> programmed that way (ancestors that weren't would not have been ancestors).
> Sometimes people become depressed and no longer wish to survive, but that's
> an example of neurological malfunction. Sometimes people "rationally" give
> up their own survival for the greater good, but that's just an example of
> interpreting the goal so that it has greater scope, not overthrowing it.
>
> --
> Stathis Papaioannou
Evolution doesn't care about the survival of individual organisms
directly, the actual goal of evolution is only to maximize
reproductive fitness.
If you want to eat a peice of chocolate cake, evolution explains why
you like the taste, but your goals are not evolutions goals. You
(Stathis) want to the cake because it tastes nice - *your* goal is to
experience the nice taste. Evolution's goal (maximize reproductive
fitness) is quite different. Our (human) goals are not evolution's
goals.
Cheers.
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Received on Thu Jun 07 2007 - 03:20:58 PDT