On Jan 27, 2008, at 5:40 AM, Mike Tintner wrote:
Ben: MT: Venter has changed everything
today - including the paradigms that govern both science and AI..
Ben: Lets not overblow things -- please note that Venter's team has
not yet
synthesized an artificial organism.
Here's why I think Venter's so important - to quote a post of mine
to an evo-psych group [I also recommend here BTW Dennis Noble's "The
Music of Life" - re "genetic keyboard"]:
"Over and above its immediate, technological significance for
Artificial Life, I see this as the end of an era in science. I think
the defining scientific paradigm of the last 50 years - the genetic
code, or program, and with it the idea that we are determined by our
genes - is now dead (or in its death throes). [I would define
genetic determinism BTW as ALLOWING for, and in no way excluding,
environmental influences].
I don't see what is meant by this statement. We are in some ways
determined by our genes. We can influence and change those genes.
Does that many we are any less determined by genes than we ever
were? That the genes can be more fluid doesn't change the fact of
our biology (this side of major MNT anyway) being determined by genes.
I think the replacement for that paradigm is now clear, even if it
hasn't been exactly defined, and that is - the genetic keyboard.
That might not be immediately obvious. But if you think about it,
what has happened - Craig Venter & co creating a new genome - 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. Clearly it is in the nature of the
genome to recreate itself - and not just to execute a program. (And
indeed, had the computational paradigm been properly thought
through, it would have been noted that it is in the nature of
programs - as actually produced and existing on computers - that
they are NOT stable entities but are normally, and more or less
demand to be, endlessly reprogrammed - by the use, as it happens,
of a keyboard).
This is not "clearly" clear at all. It is a bit of poetic
extrapolation. It certainly is not clear that genetic manipulation
will take us to super-human intelligence faster than AGI will.
Craig Venter has disavowed genetic determinism: "There are two
fallacies to be avoided," Dr Venter's team write in the journal
Science.
"Determinism, the idea that all characteristics of a person are
'hard-wired' by the genome; and reductionism, that now the human
sequence is completely known, it is just a matter of time before our
understanding of gene functions and interactions will provide a
complete causal description of human variability."
More significantly for EP, Venter has also disavowed natural
selection:
"The key problem is that far from being the simple computer code we
once thought it was, DNA is fabulously complex. When I last
interviewed Venter a decade ago, he said our DNA was too complex to
be designed by man and probably even too complex for natural
selection. The problem has worsened: "With the publication now of
the full genome, it's clearly more complicated than ever.
Huh? So DNA proves god or some super-intelligence behind it all?
This is seriously adrift.
"All our data from the environment and other places is telling us
there are different components to our personalities.
So?
Certainly step by step everything's just a point mutation and things
change. But I don't think that can explain everything. People have
this simplistic view of Darwinian evolution as random point
mutations in the genetic code followed by natural selection. No, I
don't think that would have got us out of our genome."
On what basis? So he doesn't think so. So what? That is not a
reasoned argument. People that actually understand evolution do not
speak in terms of "random point mutations". We are not in any real
sense yet "out of our genome".
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2752196.ece
P.S. I would acknowledge that there is still philosophical/
scientific work to be done - the case for the changeover of
paradigms has been not fully made. But it is now inevitable.
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, so cog sci has left the indispensible human programmer/
operator out of its computational paradigms.
Huh? It has done no such thing.
To bring in the Gudrun discussion, you could say that science is
about to tell us that what you - your self - do with your body (as
distinct from how it works) is not science but art (and, let's not
forget, technology). The idea that you are deterministically
destined to play only one kind of music on your keyboard is quite
mad - a keyboard, by definition, like your body and brain, offers
you an infinite range of possibilities.
This is a notion of determinism that is somewhat mad but it is not
what science actually says but a peculiar interpretation. A keyboard
is not infinitely malleable. It has a range of capabilities. You
are free to making any composition using it that it is capable of but
not more than that. The human body/mind offers you many, many choices
but all within a limited range consistent with the limitation of that
evolved design and and implementation. It is a very happy possibility
that that range includes the possibility of transcendence of the range
through science and technology. Whether we actually take the next
step in transcendence to transcend caps on individual and group human
intelligence remains to be seen.
- samantha
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