I don’t understand more than 25% of it, but I took Freedom Evolves back off the shelf the other day and have been reading it on the way to work. The material is really heady (the book is about free will in a deterministic universe) but Dennett’s words are flexible and he writes in a very accessible way.
I love this passage about "hacker Gods," or, well… information professionals:
…[T]here is the activity of our hacker Gods, who are free to cast their eyes and minds over huge manifolds of possible Life worlds, trying to figure out what will tend to work, what will be robust and what will be fragile. For the time being, we are supposing that they are truly God-like in their "miraculous" interactions with the Life world… they can intervene, reaching in and tweaking the design of a creation whenever they like, stopping the Life world in mid-collision, undoing the harm and going back to the drawing board to create a new design. Wherever they can foresee a source of difficulty they can set themselves the task of designing a way of countering it. Their creations will be the unwitting, foresightless beneficiaries of the foresight of the hacker Gods, who have designed them to thrive in just such circumstances.
I’ll insert a pause where Dennett doesn’t. Take a breath, and think of CmdrTaco‘s foresightless beneficiaries, thriving in his robust world.
Hacker Gods have their limitations, however, and will economize wherever they can. For instance, they might interest themselves in such questions as: What is the smallest Life-form that can protect itself from harm x or harm y, under conditions z (but not under conditions w)? After all, gathering information and putting it to use is a costly, time-consuming process, even for a hacker God.
Hear hear! It’s hard out here for a hacker God.
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