That's very close to the thesis of Richard Dawkins' seminal book, the Selfish Gene--we're just machines constructed by genes to replicate them. It's literally true, of course, but we don't often take that perspective; yet many things in biology aren't intuitive unless and until we do.[1]
[1] OTOH, some things in biology become inexplicable when we do take that perspective, such as non-kin altruism. IIRC, Dawkins admits as much in the book. (Contra some subsequent sociopolitical interpretations, Dawkins never used his "selfish gene" model to refute the possibility of non-kin altruism, just that the model in isolation was insufficient to explain non-kin altruism, the existence of which he seemed to take for granted, at least in humans.)
Don't think that we don't see this.
And yet I bet those you make the suggestion still say "master bedroom" (which actual is a direct reference to slavery).
I switched to originating new repos as main instead of master personally, reinforcing the concept of “commuting to” or code “being committed” to “master”, seems diametrically opposed to progress.
Personally, my favourite is this Github repo https://github.com/queer/boxxy
The primary branch is called "mistress". haha, that's good
As for having a "main" branch or other things like that, I don't really mind the change much. Admittedly, both the claims about implications surrounding slavery and counter-arguments regarding names like having a "master record" seem overblown to me (on one side, why care about some obscure software term instead of trying to effect actual change? on the other, why push back against a trivial change so much, it's not like using a different term is so hard if it pleases a lot of people?), although perhaps due to me not having the heritage of the people in the US, so I just quiet down and do the sensible thing.
People just want an in group and an out group. And there’s an endless parade of grifters willing to provide that.
The point of the book is that the mechanism explaining such things shouldn’t stop at “because it’s good for the group” instead digging down into why what’s good for the genes must explain the higher order behavior.
Just because you get diabetes doesnt mean its the intended behaviour of evolution. Could be a spandrel, or an artifact, or aliasing, or a plain mistake.
Consider Memory B cells, which are formed early during foetal development. They hang around in the body for years - sometimes decades - looking out for new and unusual pathogens. When they encounter one, they internalize the peptides and then (typically, but not always) rush off to a germinal center to help manufacture new T cells that can recognize and defeat the unwanted interloper. then the B cells leave again and go back to their vigil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_B_cell
Conversely, when you look at the dynamics of large groups, organizations, and corporate entities (institutions as well as business, up to whole nations), it's hard not to see them as organisms in their own right that have a sort of meta-consciousness independent of their component humans.
* This is a joke
Most recently I found myself framing zoonotic diseases (e.g. Lyme, Covid, Malaria) as ecosystem-level weapons against habitat loss i.e. as a manufactured reason to keep humans away.
You both might find this interesting :)
Information Closure Theory of Consciousness (2020) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342956066_Informati...
> However, only information processed at specific scales of coarse-graining appears to be available for conscious awareness. We do not have direct experience of information available at the scale of individual neurons, which is noisy and highly stochastic. Neither do we have experience of more macro-scale interactions, such as interpersonal communications. Neurophysiological evidence suggests that conscious experiences co-vary with information encoded in coarse-grained neural states such as the firing pattern of a population of neurons. In this article, we introduce a new informational theory of consciousness: Information Closure Theory of Consciousness (ICT)
Still watching the seminars, but this is the clearest text summary I've found online so far: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/dco3t1/com...
Has anyone seriously tried tackling this with fiction?
Does this mean monogamy is unnatural? Or at least at one point was not the norm? And still isn't? As why continue to optimize for co-operation?
I wouldn't call monogamy unnatural. But it may be a more recent invention for humans. We still aren't sure how long it's been the norm.
It's possible that humans used to rape more often. It's also possible that humans practiced forms of polygamy. Either way, cooperative sperm makes sense. It's one of those things where a simple mutation would provide a clear benefit over the competition.
You could expect that if each of them were an individual. Are they? One could say that all sperm-cells in a single ejaculation are part of the same single man.
Therefore the principle still holds, but it could be re-phrased as:
"Every sperm-cell for the donor-man"
Each sperm has a different DNA, they are like siblings. It's expected some cooperatio, but also some treason and backstabing.
[1] Ignoring some interesting cases.
That wouldn't be surprising, but I don't know if that is true.
I wouldn't not be surprised either way. A species survives not because its individuals do but because its genes do. Taking all available genes and spreading a subset of them amongst sperm-cells randomly is an interesting strategy.
It might be even optimal because the traits of a sperm-cell that make it survive during conception are not the same traits that help an individual thrive outside the womb.
If the 'fastest swimming' sperm-cell would always win, it would mean that in future generations faster and faster sperm-cells would win, but that would not necessarily help the survival of the species.
That seems to be obviously true to me. The alternative would be that consciousness simply appears at some point out of literally nowhere because there would be no lower levels from which it emerges.
* pushes the problem one level down ("why are cells conscious?")
* adds the problem of explaining how consciousness of a person relates to consciousness of its cells.
What would this model help explain?
Cells consciousness would be a much, much simpler sort of consciousness, something any "object" that somehow is capable of searching for food and avoiding "danger" should possess.
Higher level things emerging from similar, but lower level things is not a mystery, it's something expected (like ant colonies).
That's actually a thing, or at least there's a name for it:
The natural, most efficient, and optimal state of an animal is napping.
Wakefulness, and everything that happens during that time, is just an annoying distraction to maintain homeostasis.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii#Behavioral_d...
This perspective could kind of also apply to plants, a la The Botany of Desire (good book). From a certain plant's perspective, humans exist to help them reproduce.
Sure, it's the genes that are doing all of this, but the fact that they would chose two totally separate body plans, each which is a reproductive system for the other... It just seems a bit too scifi to be real.
My guess is that they were predominantly haploid (like sperm/eggs), and just had a diploid (like most other human cells) phase for reproduction. Somewhere along the way this switched (which is thought to have happened in plants also, mosses are primarily haploid while flowering plants are primarily diploid).
...which is totally bonkers. It's like if sperm/eggs went around making all of the important decisions and only bothered to spin up a human briefly for reproductive purposes. But then the sex got a bit out of control and got a job and an apartment and now it's the sperm who look like they're just for reproduction.
Disclaimer: I took Bio 101 two semesters back, so I'm pretty much an expert.