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Comment by beltsazar | Hacker News Reader

> There can be multiple competing objective functions

But my whole point is that there can only be one ultimate objective function: to maximize the chance of survival. There might be some other objective functions derived from the ultimate one, but none can be standalone.

Other standalone "objective functions" can always be asked "Why is it desirable?" For example, why is minimizing suffering desirable? Pain is just a signal to the brain that something dangerous is happening. Murder is "bad" because a species that has fewer counts has a lesser chance to survive. Torture is not necessarily "bad", unless it's argued that it in the long run will lessen the chance of survival.

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I disagree that maximizing the chance for survival is the only ultimate objective function, or that it's somehow the only one that can escape "why is this desirable?" questioning, or that it is even coherent as an objective function in the long run (I see no reason to think the we'll run into technological limits that prevent us from deviating from natural evolution in the future for much, if perhaps not most of life).

Evolutionary mechanisms do not bestow some "ultimate" or unquestionable truth/goal of which all others are subservient or branched from, it is merely an explanatory framework for biological continuation we've observed in the world, and like other similar explanatory frameworks we generally would do well to avoid attributing "purpose" where all we can see (if we can even see that) is "is." It certainly is likely an attributable factor for much of what we value as we are products of said process, but we do not owe it primacy any more than a computer off the assembly line owes the assembly line its purpose.

To be honest I'm now a bit confused on your position, as you explicitly brought up points in your previous post that elucidated some of the cracks in attempting to treat survival as the "one true goal":

> But when you think about it, there are "good" things that aren't advantageous (or even are harmful) to survival, and there are things advantageous to survival that are considered "bad" by most people. Many examples would be highly controversial, so I'd pick a less controversial example, but probably not the best one: eugenics.

And I could posit other thought experiments or examples or such, but perhaps first I should ask how this line of questioning doesn't lead you away from survival as the ultimate objective function.

First of all, thanks for the compelling discussion so far.

> To be honest I'm now a bit confused on your position, as you explicitly brought up points in your previous post that elucidated some of the cracks in attempting to treat survival as the "one true goal": > ... > perhaps first I should ask how this line of questioning doesn't lead you away from survival as the ultimate objective function.

To be clear, I don't hold any strong position. All my previous comments are based on the assumption that the three premises I wrote in the very beginning of the first post are true, but I'm not arguing that those premises are true. I was just elaborating the implications if they were true:

1) To survive and to reproduce would be the closest thing to the ultimate purpose of life.

2) What traits we consider "good" or "bad" would actually be just what traits are beneficial for survival or not.

When at the end of the first post I brought up the fact that morality doesn't always align with beneficialness for survival, I was trying to do reductio ad absurdum.

Maybe the three premises were not all true after all. Maybe there's something beyond the physical universe*, from which some higher being impulsively created the universe out of boredom, in which case there would still be no ultimate purpose. Or the higher being created it intentionally and with some purpose.

This might also elucidate the common argument, originated by C. S. Lewis, that all human beings know something good or bad because God imbued humans that ability. A common misconception interpreting this argument is to say only theists can do something good. Knowing is not the same as doing. All humans have the ability to distinguish good from bad, regardless of what they believe in, or whether they want to do something good or not.

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* We don't even know if the observable universe is all physical. No one knows what dark energy is, maybe it's not energy after all. In fact, dark energy is just a placeholder—we might as well name it XYZ.

> First of all, thanks for the compelling discussion so far.

Likewise thank you for the compelling discussion and clarifications.

> To be clear, I don't hold any strong position. All my previous comments are based on the assumption that the three premises I wrote in the very beginning of the first post are true, but I'm not arguing that those premises are true. I was just elaborating the implications if they were true: 1) To survive and to reproduce would be the closest thing to the ultimate purpose of life. 2) What traits we consider "good" or "bad" would actually be just what traits are beneficial for survival or not.

I think you need a few extra steps to get you from those premises to these conclusions. In fact, I'd suggest you may not even really be able to get from those premises to those conclusions, in particular I think you'd need to invoke "designers" (or "higher beings") imbuing purpose into the functional specifics of evolution to arrive there (thus contradicting one of those premises).

The premises as stated don't tell you much in the way of ascribing "purpose" to life, only how the mechanisms behind how it propagates and changes over time, just as Maxwell's equations do not define some "purpose" to electromagnetism but rather describe its evolution across time. And further the emergent systems that arise from these underlying processes, of primary importance for our conversation here consciousness and emergent from that society and civilization, need not owe all their properties to the mechanisms of the underlying systems (indeed this is what we often mean by emergence).

So ultimately I think that not only is survival not the "ultimate purpose," I think it's difficult to argue there is any intrinsic purpose there at all.

> So ultimately I think that not only is survival not the "ultimate purpose," I think it's difficult to argue there is any intrinsic purpose there at all.

Maybe I was not explaining it clearly enough, but I agreed with this. Similarly to what you said here, I said in the original post that to survive and to reproduce is more of a tautology than a purpose. What I meant is that if there must be a purpose of life, survival would be the closest thing to it, but in some strict senses of "purpose", it is not a purpose.

What's more interesting is the second implication, which suggests that there would be no objective morality if the three premises were true. I wonder if you agree that there's an objective morality. Or, to put it into a question, how do you think humans, almost universally, can distinguish good from bad?

> Maybe I was not explaining it clearly enough, but I agreed with this. Similarly to what you said here, I said in the original post that to survive and to reproduce is more of a tautology than a purpose. What I meant is that if there must be a purpose of life, survival would be the closest thing to it, but in some strict senses of "purpose", it is not a purpose.

Ah, well apologies I spent several replies only to be redundant :-).

> I wonder if you agree that there's an objective morality.

I don't think there is an intrinsic value function we can perceive/verify writ into the universe. There could be one or many, but I don't think we're presently in a position to assert what it is with any degree of confidence beyond wild speculation. This doesn't leave us with pure subjectivity/relativism, I think it just means we need to use a priori means to arrive at value functions. And once you do reason yourself to a value function or combination of value functions there are objective (though often quite difficult to analyze) answers to its optimization.

So I don't think there can be pure objectivity in value assignment, however once you bootstrap into value propositions, which could be so universally recognized so as to be very difficult to argue against (the reduction of suffering for instance), there are objective answers to optimizing for those values.

> Or, to put it into a question, how do you think humans, almost universally, can distinguish good from bad?

Without rigor I think most people instinctively tend to distinguish good from bad (insofar as those words have real meaning) by way of empathy, by the recognition of one's own internal desires and suffering and joy and recognizing the same states in others. The golden rule if you will, it's about as inherent a moral compass as I can think of.

And this indeed could be traced back to evolutionary origins and our sociability as a species. It's also quite fallible, and at scale you can see it break down again and again (empathy is a face to face sort of mechanism and tends to struggle to maintain its hold at a distance over space and time and in large numbers we find ourselves congregating and competing in, and as already noted good/bad are pretty poor substitutes for the complicated situations we find ourselves in at scale, and our evolutionary toolset is rather lacking in getting us to pay attention to the nuance and working through optimization deliberately), thus I think one could give pretty good reasons why this should not be an overriding guiding value function but rather a sort of starter's pack.

You’ve jumped to a conclusion here. If you take a step back further, you will see that your meaning is dependent on the fact that life has evolved. Prior to the existence of life, the “meaning” should be the same. If your meaning is dependent on life, it can’t be axiomatic.

You’ve only realized that life is optimized for survival and reproduction. While that’s not wrong, there’s no intrinsic meaning in this.

Ultimately, meaning and purpose are what you make them. The beginning of spacetime being equal to zero at the Big Bang is the quintessential example of a concept beyond conception. This concept similarly falls into that category.

> While that’s not wrong, there’s no intrinsic meaning in this.

I actually agreed about this. As I said in the first comment, to survive and to reproduce is more of a tautology than a purpose. If the three premises I mentioned in the first comment were true (I'm not arguing they are true), then to survive and to reproduce would be the closest thing to the ultimate purpose of life.

> Ultimately, meaning and purpose are what you make them.

While many, if not most, of us have some purposes of our own life, that doesn't change the fact that life as a whole would probably not have an ultimate purpose. Whether it matters or not is another discussion.

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