USH'S MATRIX GAME 2006 FOURTH ASSIGNMENT (PHILOSOPHY)- 'The Door'

"But what is the point? Why does any of this happen if it appears to have no final effect?"

"Well, otherwise, the foxes would have starved and all died in the first place. It prevents eradication."

"Did you not mention survival of the fittest earlier? That would just be the way it was.

"If all this is done and doesn't change anything... what, objectively, is the point of it all?"

"In some ways it seems to have no point you may have well just stayed where you are."

"'It seems in some ways' is simply fuzziness. is that what you think is so or not?"

"There is no point to it. It's a stalemate - eventually, though, one might beat the other: running twice as fast to get somewhere else."

"If you will forgive me, that makes absolutely no sense at all."

"Yes, you're probably right. I suppose I'm saying that as long as nothing is changed, then there is no point to it."

Originally posted by Ushgarak
"'It seems in some ways' is simply fuzziness. is that what you think is so or not?"

"So you feel, objectively speaking, that there has been no difference?"

"Yeah pretty much."

"The circle is not continious, Lo Qi, there is development that cannot be meaningless. I see evolution leading to creation and development of sentient beings. You cannot just limit it all to pure struggle for survival when you enter sentient beings, as we talked earlier."

"I rather think that is not what we are currently discussing."

"Well," says Lo Qi, "I rather feel I disagree with you all. I specified an objective difference. Relatively, there would be no differencer at all. But say you were neither a fox or a rabbit. Wouldn' you notice something?"

"Ah, that's different. Between the fox and the rabbit, it would still be the everyday chase, but to an outsider, someone observing their chase, they might notice that they've become exponentially faster than their previous chases."

"Absolutely. And that is the centre of this issue. With no relative difference being made to either side, the absolute difference is that both sides are always improving. Progress. What you end up with, are objectively better societies.

"It's not survival of the fittest. I am not a Social Darwinist. The weak need not perish- there need not be such a concept. The Red Queen's Race tells us that the chances of extinction to species over time- except when in isolated ecosystems where the race was never run- has been random, nothing to do with weakness of any sort. Evolution brings benefit to all."

"I've never thought of it like that," Azrael says, "It's an interesting point."

Lo Qi nods.

"Good. Let us consider, then, a different tale. The one of the brown bear and the white."

"I don't think I've heard this one."

"Perhaps 'tale' is the wrong word. But bears are brown- that is theit genetic design. Why are there white ones- and not, say, green?"