Optimization

August 10, 2021

If a word does not have a defined functionality or purpose attached/associated with it, that word has not been optimized.

A sharper-than-normal rock might be used as a cutting tool, no one has sharpened this rock with purpose. It is just an object found in nature. It’s sharpness only arises from the action of erosion or gravity dropping it. Likewise, this rock has not been created by a human, an organism with the ability to think abstractly about things and to create with purpose. This rock, then, is probably not as sharp as your average kitchen knife, something that have been created with a purpose.

First I will attempt to made some distinctions in meaning. Natural is defined as something that exists or is formed by nature. Usually in people’s minds the term nature has a relation to the outdoors: trees, animals, the ocean, mountains, etc.. So something that is created by humans is not natural. I would first like to point out that others things created by different animals than humans are natural: this is animal droppings, beaver dams, bird nests. So why is there a distinction between humans and the animal kingdom, which they are apart of? Probably rooted in some religious texts, but none the less, the earth and nature has generated all animals, so anything that humans do are natural occurrences (maybe rooting in the ideas of free will). With this being said, I would like to make a distinction between optimized outcomes (the things that most people would call un-natural) and un-optimized outcomes (the things most people would call natural).

As it is known now, most animals cannot create objects that are optimized past a certain point.

Wolves may decide that a certain hunting strategy is more effective than another, but they will not create wolf guns to heavily optimize for their hunting. I don’t know how beavers began building dams out of wood to create a reservoir of water to live in, but they have not developed concrete to created a more resilient home. Or maybe the time scale is too short. We started out by throwing rocks and other hard objects to hunt, and now we can kill with intercontinental ballistic missiles and drones. The laws of exponential growth is quite unimaginable for humans; it is hard to imagine and really grasp the concept of how large things can get. Maybe animal intelligence can have exponential growth from its genetic ancestors. Maybe because we are exponentially smart, our technologies grow exponentially quicker. Our technology growth with be proportional to a tetration function when compared to other animals, allowing their growth to seem as nothing while our growth increases. Well that took a heavy tangent. As I was saying, although animals can see a better path to a destination, they will not create a bridge to get there. So do animals have groups and hierarchies such as in a society, their society was not created for a purpose and appeared ‘naturally’ through hardwired code in the brain.

Why is it assumed that human brains are fundamentally different than other animals. We all evolved through the same fundamental mechanism, so it seems that adaptations would lie on a smooth spectrum and not a dis-continuous step-function. Are there other step-function that we can see in evolution? What happened to the animals that are in-between two connection nodes on a genetic tree?

Now societies are mostly created by humans at their start. The leaders or founders envision a state of their future and attempt to pursued others to follow their lead. You see, to the others who are not the founder, this society was created naturally around them, and even so if you’re born into it. This causes a situation where many people are using an object without knowing it’s purpose.