It does not matter. There is no meaning in it. There is just the survival/continuation.
Do blue-green algae need a meaning of their action to take over the planet and almost freeze it to death by eating all the CO2 and shitting oxygen instead?
There is nothing to examine there. You survive or you don’t. Same for people, same for algae, same for memes. You don’t need a Special Meaning, per se; any such “meaning” (usually present in the memes) is a means to end, not the reason for its existence.
Unless you want to go outside the paradigm of an iterative system, you will be bound by the paradigm of an iterative system. Does not matter if the framework is the ecosystem on a stupid rock in space, a society, or a genetic algorithm based system for a turbine blade shape optimization. The underlying rules are the same.
If we constrain ourselves to biological systems, are there long-term stable (or quasi-stable) biological systems that do not involve birth and death of the agents?
Because simple rules are easier to implement than complex ones. “Survive” is such a rule that provides you the most bang for the least complexity.
Nope. The implementation of the timer, and the decision matrix for when the cutoff time is reached or not, is way more complex; the additional advantage, if there’s any, is apparently not worth the cost of the added complexity.
Then you get a pretty fast degradation; in biological system you have a fairly high degradation rate, most mutations and changes are towards the worse. You have to pick the ones that are at least neutral, at best positive.
Then you get the framework of an artificial selection. And they will have to get into some system later, and if the system is finite/resource-constrained, they will have to compete for the limited resources. And then we’re back in the survival-of-the-best paradigm.
You don’t. You don’t need to. The outside selection factors will do that job for you. The optimum will be reached in a couple iterations.
There is no purpose. There is just survival. Purpose is what philosophers came up with as an illusion that is apparently a survival-enhancing factor worth its cost, or it would be selected against as a resource sink.
The goal is self-preservation/self-propagation. Yes, it is a circular definition. It evolved that way - the agents that did not have this goal were selected against. Those with absence of such traits are disadvantaged in comparison, so they are few and far between.
Not much, actually.
The whole planet is one such system.
Some sort of survival/spread. Whether of one’s genes or one’s ideas. It can be said that we are just vehicles for these.
The survival itself. This scales down to unicellular organisms and even into the realm of abiotic self-catalyzing systems. If it can propagate itself, there will be more of it than of what can not propagate itself. If it can propagate itself better, there will be more of it than of what can propagate itself worse. As simple as that.
We evolved into needing some goals. Doesn’t that much matter which goals as long as striving for their reaching activates certain parts of brain and floods it with certain neurotransmitters as rewards.
It exists, it evolved in the competition with other possible games into the existing system. It does not need any other justification than its own existence. If you think you have a better one, show it off and let it compete.
