Re: The Sciences of the Artificial applied to Biology

On 7/11/2025 11:49 AM, Phil Hobbs wrote:

On 2025-07-10 14:04, john larkin wrote:

On Wed, 09 Jul 2025 19:38:41 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:
>

I forgot to mention that he Sciences of the Artificial digs deep into
why living things (even microscopic ones) have distinct organs and
often components within such organs, versus the organism being a mass
of tissue that somehow does everything.  The driver is efficiency and
simplicity.
>
This assumes that life has already emerged in some unspecified way,
and goes from there.  This is a different approach than Dawkin's
Blind-Watchmaker arguments.
>
Joe
>
>
Ref:  "Simon_Herbert_A_The_Sciences_of_the_Artificial_3rd_ed" - The
Architecture of Complexity.  New copies are available from MIT Press.

>
Even single-cell critters have levels of intelligence. Some people
suggest some level of consciousness.
>
The book sounds cool.
>
Dawkin says he is an atheist above anything else. So he naturally
hides from anything that's not primitive neo-Darwinism.
>

 That's just moving the goal posts.  One gets people nowadays talking about different people's gut biomes 'communicating' with each other.  If all they mean is that there's some poorly-qnantified mauual influence, okay, but I get the impression they often mean more than that.
 I think it's unhelpful to conflate mere mutual influence with intelligence---even calling it "information exchange" imports the idea of meaning, which requires actual intelligence.
 Cheers
 Phil Hobbs
 

I blame comp sci/software marketing who've has been calling anything more sophisticated than a bubble sort an "intelligent algorithm" for like 40 years.
Stuff like Bayesian inference and A* search should be in a data structures and algorithms course but they put it in the "Artificial Intelligence" course cuz when you put course titles with the word "algorithms" in it students are like "shit the homework's just going to be a lot of irritating Big Oh runtime analysis questions", it unearths past trauma, and they're not signing up for that.