> Is it paranoia to think that the universe will only become more
> Darwinian after the singularity?
That may depend on the pay-offs: is it more efficient to be darwinian
than to develop using other evolutionary systems (say, cooperative
lamarkianism), and does the Red Queen Hypothesis hold (if you are not
developing, you will become obsolete and raw materials)?
I think we can look at nature to get a first suggestion: yes, it is
dawrinian (what else is new?), but that may be due to the complexity
of implementing something else (Kelly suggests that evolution is also
evolving). Evolution becomes nastier if the resources are more
scarce. And does species compete? Yes, but only when they share the
same ecological niches, otherwise they are independent or form
dependency chains. So the question boils down to: will there be
different ecological niches after the Singularity?
I think there will be unless something goes very wrong. It may turn
out that a few kinds of nanodevices are enough to turn the physical
universe into a posthuman computational playground, but in the
virtual world running on them new ecologies of infomorphs can
develop.
Resources can of course become scarce (replicators filling memory
space, limited attention etc), but if we suppose that intelligent
beings are responsible for setting up the basic template of the
posthuman evolution it is not inconceivable that they would add some
allowances to make resources grow faster than they are utilized (like
the uploads did in Egan's _Permutation City_: they let their universe
expand and adjusted their clock-cycles so that the amount of
computing power grew quite quickly to them).
Are there other ways of looking at this problem?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
nv91-asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/main.html
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y