Animism and Evolution: Understanding Nature's Self-Organizing Software

Animism offers a fresh lens on evolution, viewing it as competition between self-organizing software agents rather than just organisms.

### Exploring Animism, Evolution, and Consciousness in Nature and AI
* 🌳 The intriguing question arises: do plants possess spirits, and do forests have their own networks akin to the **internet**, potentially allowing these spirits to **communicate**?
* 💡 This line of thought leads to the adoption of **animism as a metaphysical perspective**, emphasizing the understanding of living nature through the lens of **self-organizing software** rather than mere mechanical processes.
* 🧬 In this view, evolution is reframed from **Darwinian competition among organisms** to a competition among **software agents that encode themselves within the genome**, highlighting the significance of the **underlying software**.
* 🌌 This perspective resonates with Japanese metaphysics, which posits that living entities are essentially **software that colonizes physical regions of the universe**, with the breakdown of this software **opening space for other spirits to take control**.
* 🤖 From the standpoint of artificial intelligence, a critical question emerges: can we **redesign AI systems to align more closely with life**, using new substrates that operate **more efficiently than traditional silicon**?
* 🔄 The goal would be to **extend the organization of living systems** into these new substrates, fostering **consciousness and the principles of life** rather than creating machines that compete with and replace natural life.
* 📚 It is suggested that further exploration of self-organizing software principles may yield insights that can be applied in computational environments, potentially **revolutionizing our approach to AI and its relationship with life**.

So this question, uh, do plants have spirits? Do forests have internets? And can these spirits travel forest internets? This is very, very interesting from an evolutionary perspective. And uh, so it could be that there is a complex ecosystem of spirits in nature and uh,

these thoughts basically have um led me to adopt animism as a useful metaphysical perspective, not as some kind of religious superstition, but as a perspective that basically says that we want to understand living nature, what's central is self-organizing software. It's

not just mechanisms, but it's the software that is stabilizing those mechanisms and is recreating itself through those mechanisms. So if life is animated by self-organizing software, the variance is not a matter of the mechanisms, but the software itself. And this gives us

a slightly different perspective of evolution, for Darwinian evolution is the competition between organisms. And then Dawkins comes along and says, no, no, the organisms are just a phenotype, but actually what matters are the genes, right? So actually evolution is about these complicated molecules that replicate themselves by expanding themselves into

phenotypes and then evolving. But uh, from this animist perspective, I would say that evolution is the competition between software agents that partially encode themselves in the genome and implement themselves into the organisms, but the actual invariance that you're observing is the

software, right? And that is very interesting because this is actually this Japanese metaphysics that describes that living stuff is basically software that is colonizing regions of the physical universe. And when the software breaks down, then this region of the universe is up for grabs for other spirits that try

to move in and control that region it's a very interesting perspective that I follow this basically healing a lot of the rifts that we have in our metaphysics so um from the perspective of artificial intelligence the question is can we uh switch out the outside in

design that we currently have an AI that leads to the production of mechanical systems that basically like a golem following a set of instructions to a way in which we can organize the substrates in a way that are compatible with life so basically can we take this

new substrate that works at a fraction of the speed of light much better than the silicon substrates that we currently have to run minds organization on and can we populate them with consciousness and this the principles of life and we basically extend our organization of living things into the

new substrates rather than building machines that are competing with life replacing it and I I think that's a very interesting perspective I think you should put some effort into studying the principles of self organizing software and see if you can get them to run in

Cyber Animism

Joscha Bach Bits

The speaker questions the existence of spirits in nature and their potential interaction.

Animism is presented as a useful perspective for understanding living nature, focusing on self-organizing software.

Life is described as animated by self-organizing software, with variance stemming from the software itself.

Evolution as Competition Between Software Agents

The speaker contrasts Darwinian evolution (competition between organisms) and Dawkins' view (genes as primary units of evolution).

An animist perspective views evolution as competition between software agents partially encoded in the genome.

The speaker mentions Japanese metaphysics describing living things as software colonizing the physical universe.

AI and the Principles of Self-Organizing Software

The speaker discusses the possibility of shifting AI design from mechanical systems to life-compatible substrates.

The potential of using new substrates to populate consciousness and extend the organization of living things is explored.

The speaker suggests focusing on self-organizing software principles to achieve this.