Now is a good time to recap our progress and look to the path ahead. We began with considering how replicators gained benefits by growing larger, and how they needed to adapt to control these larger bodies and react to their environments. This led the replicators to evolve a memory that, once operational, endows all experience of the replicator a significance as a history of Entities that may be brought to bear in forming its reactions. The consequences of this are twofold. Firstly, Entities, as abstractions of sensory data presented to the replicator, begin to represent the World as it is experienced by the replicator, within the replicator. The nature of this representation we shall explore in depth later, but for now we shall simply say that this is the seed of relative being, Being-in-the-World, as Heidegger defines it. Secondly, Interpretation has brought the past into the present workings of the mind, philosophically we say that temporality has been introduced. These two concepts, Being-in-the-World and temporality, are the cornerstones of Heidegger's philosophical work, "Being and Time". We shall be founding most of what is to come on their properties, and shall come to know them well, but temporality is not yet complete. Before we leave evolution behind, there remains one more aspect of temporality to bring within our understanding. The origin of Anticipation The nature of the world in which replicators exist is one of persistence, matter has stability and inertia; if a rock is sitting on the ground near a replicator then it is likely to be there ten seconds and ten years from the present if no agent acts upon it. Accordingly, if a predatory replicator is running towards oneself, it is not likely to suddenly vanish and appear two leagues away but continue on its course. Thus using an Interpretation of the present as a starting point it is possible to determine something of the nature of the the future environment. This is the next evolutionary step that Dasein must take; by using the same neurological model it evolved to Interpret the senses, a replicator may now Interpret the product of those senses and in so doing create a possibility of what what is sensed may become. This Interpretation is called Anticipation, its source is the Entities of the now and its product is, based on experience, what they may become, the Potentiality-for-Being of those Entities. A replicator that Interprets only the senses is going to be in a continual state of reaction, and though learning from its environment, always temporally behind events that occur. The ability for a replicator to Anticipate, or predict, a possibility of the world from what it can detect in the present, and act on that possibility before it even occurs gives the replicator a huge evolutionary advantage. Not only can a replicator now act on what another replicator may do, but also, through development of an Entity of the self, on what itself may do and so to some degree take control of itself as a process. We are jumping ahead a little with such considerations, but perhaps one can appreciate that these are the first steps towards "free will" and sentience. Thusly, the temporality that was introduced on the previous page, the use of the Entities of past experience, has been expanded to involve a potential future, which together with senses that represent the World Now, the present, gives the replicator the logical foundation for all tenses. On to philosophy... Here, our evolutionary introduction finishes, and though we shall return to biology in a while we must move onto the ideas that only philosophy can supply. Do not worry if some of the terms introduced are not yet clear, they shall be explored more explicitly from now on, as we slowly progress, keeping computational understanding of the problem as our goal. Summary
Created 27th June 2008 Revised 29th June 2009 |