Much of my career was spent in AI work, and we thought about this question a lot. The place that we generally landed is that agency (and related concepts like self-awareness and consciousness) is very much a gray area. There’s no line in the sand, because intelligence is an emergent property of the complex structure of the brain, and there’s an infinite spectrum of complexity there in animals. Trees are an interesting middle ground, since they do exhibit many aspects that look like “goals” and “intentionality” but it’s important to tread lightly here because the human capacity for anthropomorphism is immense.
That said, there are clear cases as well. A rock has no agency, and likewise evolution is just a property of a system, like gravity or chemical reactions. Chemical reactions aren’t trying to do anything or get anywhere, they just happen because electrons exist. Evolution is the same, but we struggle to grok that because morphology in plants and animals appeals so strongly to our sense of design. This effect is so strong that we justify entire religions around it. But no, evolution just “is”.
I thought the notion of agency was a theistic fallacy forced upon us by Christian evangelists who wanted to bend our minds around their flawed conception of “sin”.
Which is how you wind up with bizarre kludges like the “thumb” on pandas and the ridiculous spinal “support structure” that causes humans such misery. Evolved to support quadrupedal locomotion, and works great as a “suspension bridge”. Look at what great use cats make of it! But as a tent pole? Yeah, it sucks. Evolution is not lazy, it is just mindless and pointless. And yet still comes up with solutions that we cannot touch. If our engineers can develop solar panels that rival photosynthesis in efficiency, our power woes are over!
Paul Stamets’ “wood wide web” taken to its logical extreme leads to sentience of a completely alien sort, almost a Gaia type thing. Bizarre to contemplate.
Indeed! Where evolution really excels is optimizing for energy efficiency in local maxima. Once a niche is found, evolution will optimize the hell out of it. Genetic algorithms are achieving much of the same success in similar use cases. We use them to optimize the machine learning structures that make voice recognition and such possible. Evolution is really bad at breaking out of those same local maxima though, which is why nature is mostly really crappy things that sorta work well enough for the animal to reproduce and not much else.
Machine learning does this too, and is also very bad at breaking out of those local maximas.
You see this when you’re working on something, and you start it going. Gen1 is meh. Gen 5 shows great progress, and gets you a good distance towards your goal. Gen 40 is looking a lot better. Gen 80 has you almost convinced you’re about to win some computing prize… and then Gen 81 - Gen 14,000 basically don’t get you any closer to solving your goal. Gen 19,000 is a regression a little bit, and your results were in the early Gen 100s.
So you tear open the model inside Gen 100 only to understand that you don’t have a clue what it’s doing. You didn’t really make this thing, you have no idea why it’s chosen what it’s chosen. It’s good enough for what it does, but not good enough for more than that and there’s no real path forward.
I actually thought about not phrasing it that way to avoid that kind of anthropomorphizing, but decided “fuck it,” because evolution, as a process, is (metaphorically speaking) lazy. And of course the process, not guided by any intelligence or intention, is (speaking metaphorically or not) dumb. I’m always amused by creationists talking about how organisms (or parts thereof) “must” be created by an intelligent creator because complexity, when the reality is the opposite - if we viewed the evolutionary process as a “creator,” they’d be a wildly incompetent, dumb, lazy asshole.
Haha, exactly. All these “amazing” structures are actually kinda terrible at what they do. Intelligent Design arguments are also deeply rooted in ignorance of animal anatomy. They argue things like “the eye couldn’t have come from nowhere! It’s too complex!” Well, no it couldn’t, and it didn’t. Every structure in the human eye has been traced quite well to more primitive versions that often served unrelated purposes, but you have to read a lot of evolutionary biology to know that. The other argument I love from the ID crowd is the banana, which is “so perfect” for us to eat. Well, yah, because we made it that way. Nothing we grow for food even vaguely resembles the plant that was originally cultivated thousands of years ago. Carrots come from a tiny purple root smaller than a fingernail.
My personal running joke for an argument against God is human teeth. We live ~60 years on average without much intervention, but our teeth last half that long unless meticulously, fastidiously cared for in ways that are only recently possible with modern science. That’s a comically bad design if ever there was one. So if there is a God, he’s a hack.
I… don’t think so… Unless you define efficiency differently.
Disclaimer: botanist here. If we could properly harness photosynthesis, our energy problems would be a thing of the last. I had a microbiology lecturer who was working on Rhodospirillum, and some extremophiles among others, to produce H2. He gave up and said times aren’t right for this. Nobody was interested at the time. He wanted to scale up bioreactors, but noone wanted to finance this. That was quite a while ago, and he’s long gone now.
Creationists’ use of the human eye as supposedly a point in their favor amuses me to no end. It shows how disconnected with reality they are that they still use that as an example. I remember someone saying something along the lines of, “no engineer could make a camera that was as well designed as the human eye!” and thinking, “well, I suppose that’s correct, inasmuch as any engineer who tried to move ahead with a camera design similar to the human eye would immediately be fired for gross incompetence.”
And, based on a multitude of examples from the natural world, a sadist as well.
