Re: The Sciences of the Artificial applied to Biology

john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> wrote:

On Fri, 11 Jul 2025 11:49:03 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
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On 2025-07-10 14:04, john larkin wrote:

On Wed, 09 Jul 2025 19:38:41 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:
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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.
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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.
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Joe
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Ref:  "Simon_Herbert_A_The_Sciences_of_the_Artificial_3rd_ed" - The
Architecture of Complexity.  New copies are available from MIT Press.

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

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Even single-cell critters (including our own cells) have
extraordinarily complex behavior. And nobody understands how our
brains work.
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What I'm suggesting is that we not exclude thinking about possible
biological mechanisms for theological reasons.
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What's your definition of "actual intelligence" ?  I know that most of
what I do (and invent) is done unconsiously.
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Is an oyster intelligent?
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An intelligent being, properly speaking, is one with a *nous*.

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Cheers
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Phil Hobbs
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--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs  Principal Consultant  ElectroOptical Innovations LLC /
Hobbs ElectroOptics  Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics