If Life is a Macro Neural Network, What are we Converging Towards?

[ModShop]

Loosely speaking one could view life itself as a neural network, literally on the micro scale and more figuratively on the macro scale. We have diseases, mutations, fitness functions etc. In an artificial neural network the creator fine tunes various factors, such as the above mentioned, to obtain an eventual convergence on the desired solution. In reality, some say this creator is God while others say it is simply the natural way of things. The identity of said entity is irrelevant, however, as we are still ultimately being fine tuned by something in order to converge to a final state. What do you think that final end is? What exactly is life on earth being fine tuned to arrive at? Of course there really isn't any likely answer, I just think it's a very interesting notion to think that there's some larger purpose that we were made to discover over time through the same methods used by engineers using artificial neural networks. Is all of this just some super being's play thing used to determine the best strategy for Civilization V? What do you guys think?

[megatron 0]

If The Matrix was right, solving itself.

[helios]

we are still ultimately being fine tuned by something in order to converge to a final state.

There are three unproven assumptions in this sentence.

First, that life is being fine tuned, in any sense. While it's true that individual species adapt to their environment, that doesn't imply that life taken as a whole adapts, except to those things that are common throughout the Earth (gravity, radiation, etc.). If this is what you mean by "fine tuning" then I guess you could say that ultimately life on Earth is on the whole progressing towards a state where it can survive on an Earth-like planet. Yes, it's a really weak statement. Such is life.

Second, the "in order" implies that evolution has a goal, which is either false or extremely not apparent. It's easy to get trapped into an anthropocentric view of evolution and to look at your own genealogy as a clear progression towards humanity. However if, say, a jellyfish was somehow capable of such thoughts, it would also conclude that evolution has been leading up to it.

Third, that life tends to converge. If you look at the history of life, the exact opposite becomes evident. It has never been observed that two initially different species mutated in such a way that they became capable of producing fertile hybrids. What we see constantly is populations of the same species becoming isolated from each other, adapting to their different environments differently, and then branching off into separate species.

Is all of this just some super being's play thing used to determine the best strategy for Civilization V? What do you guys think?

I think that anything can be interpreted as anything else, if we are sufficiently flexible with our interpretation. Regardless of the specific form of one's reality, it's always possible to speculate that some cosmic being is interpreting one's existence in a way that makes sense only to them. There's little point in discussing something that might be true or false, and both cases would look exactly the same from our perspective.