Evolution is a learning algorithm

2024-09-21

“The goal is to persist in time”

What is the objective of life and natural selection? In the selfish gene, Dawkins introduces a straightforward understanding of the outcomes of evolution and natural selection. He argues that these are selfish and purely motivated by being represented in the next generation. This is a brilliant remark because by all measurements this seems to be exactly the case. Alternative forms of DNA molecules arise by mutation and recombination and these then duke it out in the realm of life to achieve time supremacy, to see who can persist the longest and take over the world.

“Evolution is a measurement performed by the genome on the environment”

Now, you have to understand that these genes and genomes come in all shapes and forms piloted by the information they carry. Every life form, the physical location that they inhabit and the competition that they face is subjected to a unique arena with unique challenges to overcome. Surviving in this world is no joke, nothing is as raw, astonishing and humbling as what planet earth had and has to offer us.

Let’s go back to the original proposed life form luca, the ultimate source of all this journey. Observe luca and hit the fast-forward button on time, one would realize that life is essentially a branching algorithm. If we forgot for a moment that species compete and that each life form is motivated by their own intrinsic selfish interests to take over the world; we would probably see that this is but an experiment to learn about its substrate! From this extremely zoomed out version we can observe that the ultimate goal of life is not copy number maximization (although that is an important sub-goal of the algorithm) but that instead life is trying to figure out the substrate it is growing on. Ever since luca the first information is being deployed in to learn about where it lives. By permutation and this inherent drive for “living” it is essentially recognizing and learning to be on planet earth. It is a search optimization with the sole goal of mastering earth. That is the goal! To spread, to try new things to recognize its environment, to know.

So, where are we at? We humans are part of this learning strategy and so far we have made significant progress towards learning about our substrate. Actually we are at a weird crossroad where we no longer care about copy number. We instead seem to care a lot more about making progress towards understanding. How peculiar that this is the case. How peculiar that when survival is solved, the next best thing we can do is recognize what we are.

Also recognize that this is at extremely low odds. But we have done it! The original plan has succeeded! Luca has succeeded, planet earth succeeded. We are here. We have arrived. And we are continually making progress. It only took and unimaginable amount of time FOR A SINGLE SPECIES to achieve the milestone where copy number becomes irrelevant. 1 / n_biodiversity chance, 1 in a billion. Maybe done with some help from outer space? Who knows. But we are here.

What is the next milestone?

We seem to know earth. We seem to know how to manipulate our phjysical surroundings, we know how to gobern ourselves we know about religion. We are barely at a decent understanding of our planet and begining to understand the universe. We are even designing new extensions of ourselves which will aid in this task. We have recognized our limitations and are constructing more intelligent buddies to deploy and report back to us. So anturally the next milestone is to do the same thing but at the galactic scale.

And this begs the question.

If we are a result of life, which we have learned is actually an evolutionary algorithm to make sense of reality… and we happened to happen at planet earth. Then, are there other learning algorithms deployed in other planets? where these more efficient than ours? Are they also in a state where they have solved survival and are now looking towards the stars? When we step outside of our orb… who will we encounter? Is this survival 2.0? Will this undertaking also last millions of years? And what happens then? what happens when we duke it out with fellow galactic species and arrive at new understanding. Are we god then? Is that what it means to be alive?