genetic algorithms and fitness functions
So, I can’t remember if I’ve written about this before or not, but it popped into my head last night and I thought I’d write about it some more in any case.
It’s generally taken for granted by most adherents to darwinism that the fitness function in play on Earth is whether or not a organism survives to reproduce.. and I have to admit, given the results of DNA tests this has a high degree of plausability, however it is easy to imagine a situation where it isn’t actually true, or it’s true but future incarnations of DNA sequences depend on fitness results beyond mere survival.
I am of course thinking about my kittens – often a kitten will ‘survive’ (which just requires coming home with a nonzero amount of coin in it’s little kitten pouch on it’s collar) but still be culled by the algorithm because it’s not good enough (for example, only the top 10% of kittens usually move on to the next generation, and there are also things (like asserting buy and sell at the same time) that will get a kitten cut.
If there were things like this in play on earth we might not be aware at them, both because it would be easy to develop both fake and real DNA (this is the assuming-the-operator-of-the-universe-is-Loki sort of thing) and also because we might have real DNA but still be living a iterative series of lives in which only the top few percent of each generation move on to the next simulation. And that’s before we even get into discussions about the multi-world interpretation and the possibility that we are wandering from universe to universe based on the decisions that we make.
A interesting idea to play with is how something like a genetic algorithm might interface with something like quantum immortality. Not a particularly *happy* idea, though – if no one can actually die, then the people who draw a bad hand genetically will end up worse and worse off.