On 23 Jul 2011, at 18:23, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Jul 23, 5:53 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
A sculpture (non moving, dead)? Or a zombie? (behavior is preserved)
I would not call it 'behavior' unless that is understood to exclude
agency. I'd just call it mechanism. A zombie also is both too somatic
and too necrotic a term. More like an automaton or a cartoon.
If you make a YouTube flip book, with an ELIZA type bot behind it, is
that a preservation of behavior? Behavior without any intention behind
it, without any motive sense of it's own, is a reflection of the
motive sense of the creator and the audience.
I was mentioning the so called philosophical zombie. By definition
they keep the complete behavior of a human being. No one can see the
difference with a human being. But by definition they have no private
experience at all.
In both case it makes DNA magical, infinite or non Turing emulable.
It
makes also the theory of evolution doubtful, because it means that
nature has to take into account infinite information to select the
organisms. Biological evidences points on the contrary that nature
bet
on approximations, redundancy, and allow a big range of perturbation
of its elements. Our material constitution changes all the time, and
allow contingent variations which would be hard to manage in case all
the decimals of the physical parameters have to be taken into
account.
Right, I don't think that DNA is the only possible life-like
construct, it's just the one that happened to have happened. Like a
quantum experiment, there may be a kind of backward reaching wave
function collapse which limits the need for life-like elaborations
from cropping up from different areas of the periodic table. Not sure
that our conscious engineering of it can change that ruling, or
whether that recipe is local to a particular range of physical
circumstances...will the elements ever spontaneously drift into new
behaviors? I doubt it, but who knows. This area of guessing what life
could or could not be made of is way more speculative than my
hypothesis gets into. I'm mainly interested in the big picture of what
the cosmos actually is.
OK. But with comp it does not depend on which material you are using.
Life crops everywhere in arithmetic, and the cosmos appears in long
sharable computations which multiply enough to make white rabbits
(extravagant happenings) disappearing statistically.
You are not obliged to believe that comp is true to understand the
reasoning.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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