--- In [email protected], "curtisdeltablues" <curtisdeltablues@...>
wrote:
>
> --- In [email protected], "Rick Archer" <rick@> wrote:
> >
> > You don't see infinite intelligence at work here Curtis?:
> > http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bolinsky_animates_a_cell.html
> >
>
> Great video, thanks Rick. I love TED talks. He makes a better case for
> limited rather than infinite intelligence for me. Despite my enthusiasm for
> the brilliance of his use of arts integrated learning, which is bound to
> engage the student's brains more completely, I am also aware that this
> technique is only as scientifically accurate as the analogous visual language
> is used by the programmer. I was concerned with his use of the term
> "irreducible" at the beginning of his talk because this is not a principle in
> cellular biology that I know of. In fact it has been specifically refuted by
> the knowledge we have of the evolution of cells. So he may have tipped his
> hand too quickly and scientific accuracy should concern us moreso because our
> mind's ability to detect the difference between electromicroscopic images and
> these animations is absent. I kept thinking that I was seeing into a cell,
> which is wonderfully compelling but wrong.
>
> As a refutation of an idea of an infinite intelligence at work, I present
> this guy's body. An obvious result of our brain's evolution where his
> recently added rational thinking processes telling him to push away from the
> desk and jog around the building he works in occasionally has been trumped by
> the lower brain's attractions to high fat high sugar food in excess of his
> activity. So instead of dropping down and doing say 10 pushups every half
> hour, he has been compelled to download Twinkies and chips washed down by
> gallons of Mountain Dew which tricks the brain into believing it is
> nourishing like a ripe fruit would be if it was that sweet, hijacking his
> amigdalla and hippocampus into compelling him through dopamine rewards,
> beyond all reason, to continue a lifestyle that is killing him. And all of
> this with the perverse kicker that he "knows better"!
>
> Finite intelligence seems to cover the presentation for me. But that doesn't
> mean I didn't love it just as much. If the underlying case being made is
> that life is amazing and beyond our conscious comprehension, I am all in!
>
> Happy Thanksgiving, the holiday which demonstrates more than any other that
> our brains are a conflicting mess of impulses, higher and lower, unless of
> course you are putting out tofu turkey, in which case moderation is much
> easier since our primitive brains are not fooled by our conscious mind's
> absurd assertion that it is just as good as a heritage breed turkey who lived
> a life of fabulously nutritious feed until his last, inevitable, bad day!
> The same inevitable day we will all face despite our wonderful imaginations
> that our beliefs have altered the fact that we are much more like turkeys
> than the gods of our literature and computer animations. Finite not infinite
> in the end.
>
>From what I read and think about, it all does seem to be heading in that
>direction (finite) altho I still cling with hope and past well- assimilated
>beliefs that I am more than a turkey, or a stone for that matter. the whole
>shebang is so unfathomable and reallly fires off those brain cells and
>stetches their capacity (at least that is how it feels). I still like the
>idea that human nervous systems are part of the universe's automatic
>evolutionary process of figuring itself out, of developing a asystem that can
>codify the laws of everything.
