Physics Guy wrote:Yes, because evolution can only follow proliferation gradients. It has no drive towards complexity for its own sake.
But evolution doesn't normally have to be super-efficient. Fitness only means being better than the competition, and when every organism is running DNA that has been kludged together under nothing more clever than F = m a, the bar can be low. I think it may be that conscious minds are a natural phenomenon like fire, which only happens under special circumstances, but takes off like crazy when those circumstances are present, regardless of whether the results are good or bad. So consciousness has to be correlated with survival advantage, but not every aspect of consciousness has to have been optimized by natural selection.
Let us say that everything you say is true. So nature made a creature that studies nature. Is it also true that man now has the ability to control aspects of nature based on man's desire? Given several billion years will man learn how to control large scale events in nature? Folding space etc. Then will man finally figure out how to start a big bang? Maybe man already has and we are just one of an infinite number of cycles. Now you may not like this idea. You may say it is impossible. But man has said that many times in the past and has been proven wrong. So when I say the universe has been here for eternity and advanced humans made this place, maybe I am right if viewed through the eyes of the natural progression of science.