Copyright © ‘Reality’ Doug 2013
To Philosopher to King by ‘Reality’ Doug is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
In subchapter 2.3 I detailed the evolution of our universe into us and our world based on the evidence we have available. From the start of the ongoing Big Bang the substance of our universe has been in flux. We should be any different? The material substance tends to build from hydrogen to iron, very slowly, such that molecules based on numerous elements and innumerable combinations are possible. Molecules that could replicate themselves in the flux with imperfect reliability found the evolutionary sweet spot. Natural selection favors the most competitive designs under the circumstances as if rewarding a will of organic technology to live. Genes are that organic technology. The evolutionary sweet spot is our calling, our culling, our prison, our bedrock.
It should be no surprise that discrimination is fierce among mortals because it is imperative. The sexualization of reproduction only made the agony worse and the evolution better. Evolutionary progress is not monotonic: it’s fitful. Best depends on the context. It is probable that evolution spins its wheels quite a bit. Leigh Van Valen gave us the Red Queen hypothesis, named after the character in the novella Through the Looking-Glass. The Red Queen explained that the reward of all-out running was keeping one’s place. The tools of technical analysis available to the average investor of stocks is more sophisticated than ever, but so what? It’s still a zero-sum game where the government-enabled house has the upper hand in some newly contrived and obfuscated way.
Feral natural selection goes by the expedient greedy method. Instinctively, no obtainable margin of safety is too much. Since resources are limited, the greedy method obtains in society as well, from both conscious and instinctive actuation. The right or wrong of strategies is not immediately evident in outcomes. Progress takes lots of trials to get tendency bias and lots of proven biases to find an advantageous one and lots of advantageous ones to arrange a progressive trend. Evolution defines the only ‘greed’ that matters: the quest for more power over resources. Control is beholden to application because goodness is the prerogative of nature.
At best good and evil are hyperbolic terms regarding the ‘judgment’ of nature. Otherwise, good and evil are self-serving terms of the individual. Power is a formula of competition and cooperation, and the race goes on. Greed is good in so far as potential for existent empowerment is improved. The greater good of the individual or the species is not the consideration. It is the greater power to command resources. In a strictly natural sense, greed is good.
The greater good of the gene pool may have been the only consideration, but in animals it has deferred itself to become the only foundational consideration of something more powerful: organic computation. Mental reformulation is faster than genetic reformulation. A computation saved is a computation earned, so the mental networking of animals advanced. Linguistic ability to share on demand indefinitely complex ideas via abstraction created a revolution within evolution. Humans were able to pool their ideas into a new crucible of technological evolution. Enters distributed organic computation.
This crucible was feeble at first, not much of a pool. Its strength depends on the strength and utilization of the group’s collective intelligence. Utilization of human intelligence depends upon the distribution of resource control over the availability of resources. Ultimately, humans competed primarily against each other on the strength of their cooperation. Free but standardized speech to select the best ideas became increasingly critical, and philosophy was born out of survival competition to maximize the realization of human potential. Will human potential be enough for evolution?
‘Reality’ Doug 