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Jef Allbright wrote:<br>
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cite="midB99F3B28ADD2C141B737D735CE9156C301EABBA7@EXVBE012-4.exch012.intermedia.net">
<title>Re: [extropy-chat] A future fit to live in?</title>
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<div dir="ltr"><font face="Tahoma" size="2"><b>[...]</b></font> So all
the way from single-celled organisms, through quite complex vertebrates,
to organisms that could reflectively model their own actions for improved
powers of prediction and control, even to groups of organisms acting as a
kind of superorganism that could together work better than any number of
individual organisms working separately--all that was happening, every step
of the way, was a kind of feedback loop with each organism trying to affect
change in its future environment to make it more closely match the values
in its internal model. Some of the adaptations had side-effects, some bad,
some good in unexpected new ways. The adaptation that provided an organism
with reflexive modeling lead to qualitatively new capabilities allowing those
organisms to affect their enviroment in powerful (and dangerous) new ways
(and also lead to a significant amount of wasted effort (which they called
philosophizing) as the model tried to model itself in ways that made sense
to its pre-existing set of values.</div>
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<p>What a simple way of describing the origins of complex behaviors! No
goals or supergoals to pull things along in any predetermined direction.
Just blind execution of a system that simply tries to minimize the difference
between what it senses in its environment and encoded information about what
tended to work in the past, tending to adapt in the direction of what works
over increasing scope.</p>
<p>- Jef</p>
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I think <a href="http://www.exhibitresearch.com/tilden/">Mark Tilden'</a>s
work supports this and think you deserve a charter membership in the Cult
of the Infinite Feedback Loop. : ) -- Thomas<br>
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