> Craig > Venter & co creating a new genome - Just to be clear: They did not create a new genome, rather they are re-creating a subset of a previously existing one...
>is an example of the genetic keyboard > playing on itself, i.e. one genome [Craig Venter] has played with another > genome and will eventually and inevitably play with itself. Yes >Clearly it is in > the nature of the genome to recreate itself - and not just to execute a > program. You lost me here, sorry. Nothing in Venter's work argues against the Digital Physics hypothesis, which holds that the whole universe is a giant computer program of sorts. > P.P.S. The full new paradigm is something like - "the self-driving/ > self-conducting machine" - it is actually the self that is the rest of the > body and brain, that interactively plays upon, and is played by, the genome, > (rather than the genome literally playing upon itself). And just as science > generally has left the self out of its paradigms, On the contrary, as Thomas Metzinger has masterfully argued in "Being No One" (and see also the book "The Curse of the Self", whose author's name eludes me momentarily), the "self" has been well-understood by neuropsychology as an emergent aspect of the dynamics of certain complex systems. Like will and reflective-consciousness, it is an extremely useful construct that also seems to have some irrational and undesirable (even from its own point of view) aspects. > so cog sci has left the > indispensible human programmer/operator out of its computational paradigms. It is true that human programmers are indispensible to current software systems, except for simple self-propagating systems like computer viruses and worms ... but this is just because software is at an early stage of development, it's not something intrinsic to the nature of software versus "physical" systems (which as Fredkin and others have argued, may sensibly be conceived of as "just software on a different operating system"... -- Ben G ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=90331620-260585
