EPTI was on Diablo, like usual, grinding random shit because why not, and some dude entered the game and started ranting about evolution. He'd bought the latest Richard Dawkins book "My Life in Science" and thought Dawkins was completely wrong.
So this guy actually argued with me that birds could think, and that moreover, birds were "steering the ecosystem" or some nonsense of that nature. The guy said he was "not on LSD" but felt like he was tripping, and was pretending to talk to his cat.
Apparently the cat's fur was "refracting his thoughts into the sky" and further, the cat "thought he was a god".
The guy was probably on drugs, since a lot of Diablo players smoke weed that doesn't really bother me, although I don't know that people should ever take stuff like LSD since it really could be bad for your brain.
Whatever he was doing/on/thinking about, arguing with him really bothered me, and I started to imagine "evolution by thought".
I guess you could argue that thought is one rubric by which something could evolve, and that DNA might be just a second leg. It would be kind of interesting if instead of survival of the fittest by the standard of Dawkins' "Selfish Gene" (which is probably all of Dawkins I will ever read)... if there were some kind of ecological evolution as well.
I could imagine there being a survival mechanism of some sort being guided by thinking and the ability to simulate. With humans heading into the digital era and various virtual realities corresponding, it seems like "thinking" might be a sort of ecological compass.
I realized I don't really have a problem with biological evolution corresponding with some kind of psychological ecological evolution. It seems likely to me that simply specializing in individuated survival is probably not as robust an equilibrium as one that is also ecological.
