Behold, our ancestors.

[Vene]

000, I have honestly never thought of living systems that way.  But it does seem to fit what I know about them (er..us, whatever).

[Triple Zero]

well, i'm honestly surprised, because i've tried to explain this idea to people loads of times and never had them "get it" so quickly

about the emergence book, I have trouble reading books from the screen, but I hope i can print it at university (even though i'm no longer a student, there's a good chance my acct still works), cause i really really want to read it.

I had a discussion about Emergence with someone recently, and it led me to believe that Emergence may in fact be Divinity, seeing that it's this .. thing, or concept, a process, that is so obvious, nearly tautological ("that which survives, survives" as Douglas Adams called it, in the Salmon of Doubt), it can be said to hardly "really exist", yet it's everywhere, and it causes new things to come into existence out of nothing (or out of chaos, if you like). but my idea about it isn't entirely hatched properly yet, i think. yet synchronicity has it that shortly after that discussion the topic started popping up (again) here and there on this forum

[Vene]

well, i'm honestly surprised, because i've tried to explain this idea to people loads of times and never had them "get it" so quickly

Really?  Because enzymes tend to be either "on" or "off."  When there are a lot of them present you get a gradient, but the individual components are a switch.  That's also true of nervous and muscle impulses.  A single nerve cell either sends an impulse or it doesn't, a single muscle cell either contracts or it doesn't.  And it looks like it works at the genetic level too, a particular gene is either transcribed or it isn't (regulated by proteins that are either "on" or "off").  But, I have no problems with looking at organisms as machines and this is all very machine-like.

[Kai]

well, i'm honestly surprised, because i've tried to explain this idea to people loads of times and never had them "get it" so quickly

about the emergence book, I have trouble reading books from the screen, but I hope i can print it at university (even though i'm no longer a student, there's a good chance my acct still works), cause i really really want to read it.

I had a discussion about Emergence with someone recently, and it led me to believe that Emergence may in fact be Divinity, seeing that it's this .. thing, or concept, a process, that is so obvious, nearly tautological ("that which survives, survives" as Douglas Adams called it, in the Salmon of Doubt), it can be said to hardly "really exist", yet it's everywhere, and it causes new things to come into existence out of nothing (or out of chaos, if you like). but my idea about it isn't entirely hatched properly yet, i think. yet synchronicity has it that shortly after that discussion the topic started popping up (again) here and there on this forum

LOL QUIT READING MY FUCKING MIND! 

No, srsly, thats what Kauffman talks about, how the medieval concept of god or the divine should be shifted to a modern concept that compliments science, that the emergent creativity in the universe like divinity.

[Kai]

well, i'm honestly surprised, because i've tried to explain this idea to people loads of times and never had them "get it" so quickly

Really?  Because enzymes tend to be either "on" or "off."  When there are a lot of them present you get a gradient, but the individual components are a switch.  That's also true of nervous and muscle impulses.  A single nerve cell either sends an impulse or it doesn't, a single muscle cell either contracts or it doesn't.  And it looks like it works at the genetic level too, a particular gene is either transcribed or it isn't (regulated by proteins that are either "on" or "off").  But, I have no problems with looking at organisms as machines and this is all very machine-like.

Impulse was good, muscle wasn't, because muscles fibers can contract to different degrees.

I have a problem with people thinking of organisms as machines because A) they are so so so so much more emergent than a machine is, they have agency, and B) because it spawns all kinds of intelligent design type arguments.

[Triple Zero]

Vene: maybe it helps that i really didn't go into the details and kept it short, then i can be a bit longwinded sometimes and talk about preambles and details for half an hour before (if you're lucky), getting to the point. i'm trying to avoid doing that as much as possible (i know it's annoying), but it requires concentration

in Steven Pinker's book "the language instinct", he argued that complexity such as life is there because of combinatorics. that is, the discrete nature of, say, DNA (A/T/G/C) makes it possible to get really complex stuff, cause you have to pick "one or the other", whereas if you mix two chemicals, you get a mixture. and if you throw more stuff at it, you just get more equally distributed stuff of the same.

Kai: zomg unbelievable one thing that kinda blew my mind was when the other person remarked "that may be why they say Man was created in the image of God" (because humans making/creating things are kind of like emergence-catalysts)

and Kai, about machines, i was talking about computer simulations, which run in machines, but can be way more emergent than a mere mechanical device. the trick seems to lie in having lots of semi-independent parts that act upon relatively simple rules. it's more like a bottom-up-and-see-what-happens approach than a really designed and thought out top-down architecture.

[Vene]

Impulse was good, muscle wasn't, because muscles fibers can contract to different degrees.

I guess I should have said each myosin protein instead of referring to the whole cell.

I have a problem with people thinking of organisms as machines because A) they are so so so so much more emergent than a machine is, they have agency, and B) because it spawns all kinds of intelligent design type arguments.

I think of it like stimulus-response than anything else.  Like going to muscle contraction, how is the addition of Ca²⁺ leading to a conformational change of the protein not a machine-like action?  I look at life at the molecular level more than as a whole system.  It does make me biased in a different way than those that look at individuals or groups.  I know I'm ignoring the ability to make choices, but can a plant make a decision?  Can a bacterium make a decision?

And fuck intelligent design.  Fuck those fuckers with rusty barbed wire.

[Kai]

Vene: maybe it helps that i really didn't go into the details and kept it short, then i can be a bit longwinded sometimes and talk about preambles and details for half an hour before (if you're lucky), getting to the point. i'm trying to avoid doing that as much as possible (i know it's annoying), but it requires concentration

in Steven Pinker's book "the language instinct", he argued that complexity such as life is there because of combinatorics. that is, the discrete nature of, say, DNA (A/T/G/C) makes it possible to get really complex stuff, cause you have to pick "one or the other", whereas if you mix two chemicals, you get a mixture. and if you throw more stuff at it, you just get more equally distributed stuff of the same.

Kai: zomg unbelievable one thing that kinda blew my mind was when the other person remarked "that may be why they say Man was created in the image of God" (because humans making/creating things are kind of like emergence-catalysts)

and Kai, about machines, i was talking about computer simulations, which run in machines, but can be way more emergent than a mere mechanical device. the trick seems to lie in having lots of semi-independent parts that act upon relatively simple rules. it's more like a bottom-up-and-see-what-happens approach than a really designed and thought out top-down architecture.

YES YES YES! Thats exactly what he talks about. He relates it back to the Properties of Fluid Behavior and how they can't be derived from quantum mechanics. When you have a couple molecules they function very basically from a physics standpoint. However, when you have a whole shittonne of molecules in fluid medium, the interactions between molecules becomes emergent from the basic physics. It doesn't violate physical laws, but it can't be derived from them either. Moving onwards, biology is emergent from that, and consciousness is an emergent state from biology. Some might say ecology is emergent.

Because of emergent systems, you can't just transplant system language between different systems. They each operate under different rules which don't violate but can't be derived from the emergent system below that. Then you factor in creativity, things like the near infinite possibilities of combinations in DNA and how there are so many combinations that the possibility of having a new combination (that is, having creative combinations) is a probability with a limit near 1.

[Kai]

Impulse was good, muscle wasn't, because muscles fibers can contract to different degrees.

I guess I should have said each myosin protein instead of referring to the whole cell.

I have a problem with people thinking of organisms as machines because A) they are so so so so much more emergent than a machine is, they have agency, and B) because it spawns all kinds of intelligent design type arguments.

I think of it like stimulus-response than anything else.  Like going to muscle contraction, how is the addition of Ca²⁺ leading to a conformational change of the protein not a machine-like action?  I look at life at the molecular level more than as a whole system.  It does make me biased in a different way than those that look at individuals or groups.  I know I'm ignoring the ability to make choices, but can a plant make a decision?  Can a bacterium make a decision?

And fuck intelligent design.  Fuck those fuckers with rusty barbed wire.

I and Kauffman both would argue agency does not require consciousness. Bacteria are self containing self replicating organisms that interact with their environment. Even if this is just triggers, the genes are still there enacting the triggers. Thats where the agency comes from, its an intrinsic property of living things as a consequence of the biology. Its not like a decision as we would think of it in consciousness, but it is still agency.

[Vene]

Impulse was good, muscle wasn't, because muscles fibers can contract to different degrees.

I guess I should have said each myosin protein instead of referring to the whole cell.

I have a problem with people thinking of organisms as machines because A) they are so so so so much more emergent than a machine is, they have agency, and B) because it spawns all kinds of intelligent design type arguments.

I think of it like stimulus-response than anything else.  Like going to muscle contraction, how is the addition of Ca²⁺ leading to a conformational change of the protein not a machine-like action?  I look at life at the molecular level more than as a whole system.  It does make me biased in a different way than those that look at individuals or groups.  I know I'm ignoring the ability to make choices, but can a plant make a decision?  Can a bacterium make a decision?

And fuck intelligent design.  Fuck those fuckers with rusty barbed wire.

I and Kauffman both would argue agency does not require consciousness. Bacteria are self containing self replicating organisms that interact with their environment. Even if this is just triggers, the genes are still there enacting the triggers. Thats where the agency comes from, its an intrinsic property of living things as a consequence of the biology. Its not like a decision as we would think of it in consciousness, but it is still agency.

Ah, then I have no argument.  I also have to find Kauffman's book.

[Triple Zero]

yup, that's pretty much the reason why i don't worry about the problem of Free Will too much. even if we can explain all the mechanics, there's these huge "jumps" in complexity between different scales, where emergent properties of systems build on top of eachother into new emergent properties. there's one between quantum and atoms/molecules (i think), another one between molecules and cells, then one between cells (neurons) and our brain. and i probably left some steps out of that. but i severely doubt we can ever "really" bridge those gaps, even if we understood all the mechanics that lie beneath the elements.

also, i'd like to claim that certain computer programs are in fact able to exhibit creativity (in some sense). i'm talking again here about the emergent "artificial life" like simulations.
like Thomas Ray's "Tierra", which is a simulation of a virtual computer, little 80 instructions computer programs running concurrently in the simulated memory, written in a special simple language that was designed to be kind of robust against mutations, doing nothing but replicating themselves (and artificially dying off after some amount of time). when run, predictably, they'd fill up the memory quickly in a nice limited growth curve. but then Ray added random "mistakes", every once in a while an instruction would fail, or a bit would be flipped. suddenly, an evolutionary arms race developed. since shorter programs could replicate more quickly (less clockticks needed to make an instruction-by-instruction copy of themselves), a 45 instruction "parasite" evolved, that hijacked the copying subroutine of a nearby 80 instruction program! for a while the populations of the two "species" followed a very recognizable "predator-prey" curve/cycle, but after a while a third species appeared, evolutionary optimized to 78 instructions and resistant to the parasite, on having its subroutine hijacked, the parasite would be forced to make a copy of the 78 instruction program instead ..

another example is in evolutionary computing, where they used an FPGA, a computer chip that has programmable transistors. they used an evolutionary scheme, generated a few thousand random configurations, measured the output, and the ones that looked most like a sinus curve would be allowed to continue to the next generation. after some 10,000s of generations, they had evolved a reasonable sinus curve. but upon inspecting the circuit, they found that 90% of the transistors were not used at all [an incredible optimization]! however, cutting out this 90% of "junk" resulted in a non-working chip. after puzzling about it for quite some time, they found out what was going on, the 90% "junk" transistors had evolved not into a computing circuit but were aligned into a physical antenna ... picking up the 50Hz sinus curve of some nearby electrical equipment... sorry but if that's not creativity/out-of-the-box-thinking, i don't know what is.

[Kai]

yup, that's pretty much the reason why i don't worry about the problem of Free Will too much. even if we can explain all the mechanics, there's these huge "jumps" in complexity between different scales, where emergent properties of systems build on top of eachother into new emergent properties. there's one between quantum and atoms/molecules (i think), another one between molecules and cells, then one between cells (neurons) and our brain. and i probably left some steps out of that. but i severely doubt we can ever "really" bridge those gaps, even if we understood all the mechanics that lie beneath the elements.

also, i'd like to claim that certain computer programs are in fact able to exhibit creativity (in some sense). i'm talking again here about the emergent "artificial life" like simulations.
like Thomas Ray's "Tierra", which is a simulation of a virtual computer, little 80 instructions computer programs running concurrently in the simulated memory, written in a special simple language that was designed to be kind of robust against mutations, doing nothing but replicating themselves (and artificially dying off after some amount of time). when run, predictably, they'd fill up the memory quickly in a nice limited growth curve. but then Ray added random "mistakes", every once in a while an instruction would fail, or a bit would be flipped. suddenly, an evolutionary arms race developed. since shorter programs could replicate more quickly (less clockticks needed to make an instruction-by-instruction copy of themselves), a 45 instruction "parasite" evolved, that hijacked the copying subroutine of a nearby 80 instruction program! for a while the populations of the two "species" followed a very recognizable "predator-prey" curve/cycle, but after a while a third species appeared, evolutionary optimized to 78 instructions and resistant to the parasite, on having its subroutine hijacked, the parasite would be forced to make a copy of the 78 instruction program instead ..

another example is in evolutionary computing, where they used an FPGA, a computer chip that has programmable transistors. they used an evolutionary scheme, generated a few thousand random configurations, measured the output, and the ones that looked most like a sinus curve would be allowed to continue to the next generation. after some 10,000s of generations, they had evolved a reasonable sinus curve. but upon inspecting the circuit, they found that 90% of the transistors were not used at all [an incredible optimization]! however, cutting out this 90% of "junk" resulted in a non-working chip. after puzzling about it for quite some time, they found out what was going on, the 90% "junk" transistors had evolved not into a computing circuit but were aligned into a physical antenna ... picking up the 50Hz sinus curve of some nearby electrical equipment... sorry but if that's not creativity/out-of-the-box-thinking, i don't know what is.

Yeah. Its awesome how when you take many many individual pieces (whether they be molecules in a fluid system, RNA, or transistors in this case) and put them together in a semirandom system, over time the interactions between the pieces emerge into something beyond the individuality with each piece. I think its a general property of the universe for this sort of thing to happen.

And that Terra system looks like it works exactly how the first selfreplicating molecular systems worked.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

So then, the right set of memes, metaphors, rituals and symbols... we could start ourselves a new religion!

[Triple Zero]

So then, the right set of memes, metaphors, rituals and symbols... we could start ourselves a new religion!

at first i was like , but then i

[Kai]

So then, the right set of memes, metaphors, rituals and symbols... we could start ourselves a new religion!

Or not.