The kind of environmental interaction that made mobile organisms conscious later makes mobile mechanisms conscious. A mechanism that processes its inputs with equivalents of cells and synapses is not only sensitive, like a good camera or microphone, but also sensorial, like an animal or human being - if we follow this line of reasoning.
This evolution resulted from mutation and selection among unsupervised, solar-powered, self-repairing, self-reproducing, mineral-collecting sea rafts. The first mutation was that a new kind of raft collected metal from other rafts instead of from the sea. The new kind became predators. Then other changes occurred and, as with organisms, favourable changes were selected. Evolution spread to the land and to the air and under the sea. Alloys are less alterable but more durable than amino acids and machine parts had increasingly been designed to be interchangeable. Thus, predators sometimes consume their prey and sometimes just incorporate their parts. Three billion years later, the most complex and sensitive mechanisms are self-conscious and intelligent.
Is this remotely feasible? All that we can say for certain is that Poul Anderson runs with this idea as far as he can.
2 comments:
"machine parts had increasingly been designed to be interchangeable"
I am currently reading "The Perfectionists - How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World".
Interchangable machine parts is a major part of that story.
Kaor, Paul and Jim!
Paul: I admire how far Anderson ran with the idea of von Neumann machines "evolving" to become new "species," including one of them becoming intelligent. That said, we still need to keep in mind how rarely any "mutations" within these machines will be beneficial. Anderson tried to allow for that by spacing out this "evolution" over three billion years.
Jim: I think one of the earliest developments in the precision designing/making of interchangeable machine parts started with the invention of mechanical clocks by or before 1200. The effort needed to make such clocks (and then watches) more accurate and reliable led to the idea of making the parts of such clocks interchangeable.
And that development must have helped James Watt in designing/making interchangeable machine parts for far larger devices, such as the steam powered engines he was making by 1790. The rest, as they say, was history!
Ad astra! Sean
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