Vitalism would be that there are some substances which are used by biological organisms and others that are not. There would be no bump from cell to animal to human being, or even from molecule to cell - vitalism would be that living cells are composed of life-giving molecules which are fundamentally different from non life-giving molecules. I'm not saying that at all. I am saying that you can have all the organic chemistry you like and you still won't get cells unless the molecules themselves figure out how to make them. I don't say that silicon can't make cells, only that they haven't so far, and that if we force silicon to act like cells, they won't be the same as organic cells which generate themselves naturally.
They certainly won't be the same but, how will they differ? Do you claim that such a non-biological cell will not be able to perform each and every action that is performed by a biological cell? If you do make such claim, on what basis, what justification do you make that claim? Clearly you believe that organic chemistry has something that computer chips lack; Clearly you believe that there is nothing that a ham sandwich has that a bag of sand lacks. perhaps you don't like the phrase "vital life force" for that difference and prefer some other euphemism, but it amounts to the same thing. No, it is not the same thing in any way. I am specifically saying that there are no forces or fields in the universe. None. Not literally anyhow. No more than there is a force which stops my car at a red light. There is only sense: perception and participation on different levels of qualitative depth. > Programs can and do produce outcomes that are not directly anticipated by the programmer Absolutely! > but that these outcomes are trivial If they could only do trivial stuff computers would not have become a multitrillion dollar industry that has revolutionized the modern world. That's like saying 'If soft drinks were just carbonated sugar water with drugs in it, they wouldn't have become a multibillion dollar industry...". It's a fallacy and a misrepresentation of my comment. I didn't ever say that computers can only 'do trivial stuff', only that their capacity to exceed the constraints of their programming is trivial. Computers have capacities that far exceed our own, but only in some respects and not others. They are good at doing boring repetitive shit that we can't stand doing. Why are they good at it? Because they are unbelievably stupid. They will compute Pi to the last digit until they corrode just because someone accidentally pressed the enter key. Dumb. Not sentient. No awareness. They don't care, they don't feel, they don't understand...anything at all. Those are things that we are (supposedly) good at. This is a problematic statement. Consider Myhill's work on constructor machines, where their abilities to construct is unbounded. Each machine is able to construct a machine having just slightly greater construction capacity, ad infinitum. See the paper The Abstract Theory of Self-Reproduction as presented in Burks collection Essays on Cellular Automata, U of Illinois Press, 1970. >Conway's game of life can produce a new kind of glider, but it can't come up with the invention of Elvis Presley, Not true. You can make a Turing Machine out of things other than a long paper tape, you can make one out of the game of life by using the gliders to send information; and if you started with the correct initial conditions you could have a game of life Turing Machine instruct matter how to move so that the matter was indistinguishable from the flesh and blood king of rock and roll. You are missing my point entirely. It is no trick to make Elvis from a machine which has the correct initial conditions to make Elvis. The point is that no amount of GoL transitions strung together will ever become anything other than what it is - recursively enumerated digits. There is nothing to generate any qualities other than that in the machine or the program - any patterns which we project on this data; 'gliders', 'cells', whatever, are nothing but simulacra...the projections of our own psyche. Thus my interest in constructing machines, not just Turing machines. Biological organisms are at root built on the backs of constructing machines. > We only use materials which are subject to absolute control by outside intervention and behave in an absolutely automatic way to sustain those introduced controls. Living organisms are very much the opposite of that The opposite of "automatic way" is random way. That is your completely unsupported prejudice. The legal system of every human group that has ever persisted on Earth would disagree. The opposite of automatic, according to them, is voluntary or intentional. Welcome to planet Earth, where there are things we like to call living organisms who are able to do things 'on purpose' rather than randomly or unconsciously. It might actually take a program to get random; random not necessarily opposite of automatic. wrb Craig John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/yObhqfi5TZAJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
