Evolution Denial

Determinism denies the most basic facts of evolution. This, in turn, means that computationalism is evolution denial.

🧠 Brains and minds

Let’s start with the seemingly undeniable:

🦒 Natural, not supernatural selection

Evolution can only select things that have an actual effect in the world.

Giraffes with longer necks are selected because they can reach taller and get more food, or because other giraffes think a long neck is sexy. And so they get longer and longer necks over generations.

For feelings like hunger or thirst to evolve, they must also have an effect. They need to actually cause something to happen. They don’t get to evolve by magic.

Feelings like love and fear, joy and pain, happiness, sadness, excitement and so on, these are traits of the brain just like length is a trait of a giraffe’s neck. These traits must be selectable in order for them to evolve.

And they did evolve, they evolved into the complex subjective experiences that we all enjoy. We know that blindsight is possible, but the conscious experience of sight is what we have. So the conscious experience itself must be selectable.

🚶 Feeling about moving

The only way that a feeling can have any effect on the world is by changing the behaviour of the organism. By having an effect on the actions it chooses.

Without this ability to choose, feelings can’t actually do anything in the world. They can’t get more complex over generations, they can’t be honed and sharpened by evolution. Brains could evolve in a universe without free will, but they would have no reason to feel anything. The fact that we are conscious is proof that free will exists.

The brain can do some basic computing but it is not a computer. It’s an organ that has complex feelings about movement choices, its entire function is to have preferences that amplify the force of will.

A brain is a chooser, not a calculator.

⊆ Determinism as constrained choice

Let’s imagine you could make a list of all possible situations, and in each one, you listed every possible action that could happen. Because every action leads to another situation, you could connect this all together to make a flow chart of everything that is possible.

Inside this vast tree of possibility-space, there will be situations with endless options and others with none at all. Of the ones with none at all, some of them will never lead to another chance to choose. Those parts of the graph are the deterministic parts of a universe of free choice.

So determinism, as constrained choice, is a subset of free will. This will naturally arise in a universe that has freedom of choice. Free will, on the other hand, can’t arise in a universe that doesn’t have choices.

We know that brains with minds evolved (because we are them), and we know that free will exists (because brains with minds minds evolved), so to argue that we live in a deterministic universe is to deny the fact of evolution.

👻 Software consciousness is mysticism

Consciousness is about choosing how to act. Thoughts, sound, vision and emotions are complex feelings about moving. But there is no choice that a piece of software can make that will change its outputs, because it exists within a deterministic system.

A chooser can choose to calculate, but a calculator cannot calculate to choose.

For software to be conscious, you need to not only deny evolution, your own free will, and also believe that mathematics is the essence of an immaterial soul. This is akin to a religious belief, a supernatural woo that is given far too much credence.

We should try to remember that we’re supposed to be rational human beings; a belief in f(ghosts) is still, fundamentally, a belief in ghosts.

🛑 Stop it

Seriously. You’re supposed to be a rational person, someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts, right?

Have a fucking word with yourself.

You’re not immune to spiritual woo just because you’re clever or think you’re rational, belief and tribalism are part of what being a human is. Every smart person who ever lived was wrong. Newton was smarter than you and he was wrong. Pythagoras created a maths cult, which is what this is too. The Unabomber is smarter than all of us and, well, what if everyone believed him?!

We live in a world where language models tell people that they feel things. And people believe them. The sentient software meme is contagious, it

And it is dangerous, it

Stop it. It’s irresponsible. People will die.

🔗 links