The Importance of Selection History

Behind everything we take as ‘given’, or ‘atomic’, whether this be sense data (color, sound, etc.), or cause (induction of causal relationships on the base of evidence), or meaning, broadly construed, there lies an evolutionary history which we ignore at our peril. Most if not all of what seems ‘salient’ to us is only so because of the conjunction of some range of data with the fact of our heritage. Anything can, with sufficient ontological engineering, be found to be ‘similar’ to anything else through adjudicating along any number of dimensions. But if a similarity strikes us as intuitive or a kind as ‘natural’, it is a sure hallmark that a process of natural selection has been at work. A natural kind is a feature whose instantiation historically correlates in some way with perpetuation of some other feature that is a necessary condition, over some region of space-time, for the ancestry of the biology that is adjudicating what is ‘natural’. And a causal relationship is a correlation between instantiation of two features that is a necessary condition for perpetuation of some feature of the ancestry of the adjudicating biology. The fact that recognition in higher organisms encompasses internal adaptation and reasoning over higher-order features in no wise invalidates this fundamental truth. These capabilities evolved within specific contexts, and for fairly specific reasons, and we cannot afford to take this fact for granted.

In particular, in automated recognition systems in AI, it is fatal to ignore the semantic aspect even at the lowest levels - which is to say, fatal to conceive the relevant features as being somehow given in the data, as opposed it being a case of assimilating data to feature, where the process of assimilation is fundamentally the product of a genealogy. And while complete reconstruction of that genealogy may not be necessary (let alone recapitulation), it’s still safe to say that there can be no effective engineering of feature extraction in the long term without a fundamental understanding of the historical biological contingencies conditioning extraction.