Posted on 12/03/2003 4:53:26 PM PST by Pharmboy
LONDON (Reuters) - Fossils discovered in Ethiopia's highlands are a missing piece in the puzzle of how African mammals evolved, a team of international scientists said on Wednesday.
Little is known about what happened to mammals between 24 million to 32 million years ago, when Africa and Arabia were still joined together in a single continent.
But the remains of ancestors of modern-day elephants and other animals, unearthed by the team of U.S. and Ethiopian scientists 27 million years on, provide some answers.
"We show that some of these very primitive forms continue to live through the missing years, and then during that period as well, some new forms evolved -- these would be the ancestors of modern elephants," said Dr John Kappelman, who headed the team.
The find included several types of proboscideans, distant relatives of elephants, and fossils from the arsinoithere, a rhinoceros-like creature that had two huge bony horns on its snout and was about 7 feet high at the shoulder.
"It continues to amaze me that we don't have more from this interval of time. We are talking about an enormous continent," said Kappelman, who is based at the University of Texas at Austin.
Scientists had thought arsinoithere had disappeared much earlier but the discovery showed it managed to survive through the missing years. The fossils from the new species found in Ethiopia are the largest, and at 27 million years old, the youngest discovered so far.
"If this animal was still alive today it would be the central attraction at the zoo," Tab Rasmussen, a paleontologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri who worked on the project, said in a statement.
Many of the major fossil finds in Ethiopia are from the Rift Valley. But Kappelman and colleagues in the United States and at Ethiopia's National Science Foundation (news - web sites) and Addis Ababa University concentrated on a different area in the northwestern part of the country.
Using high-resolution satellite images to scour a remote area where others had not looked before, his team found the remains in sedimentary rocks about 6,600 feet above sea level.
Sorry Junior.. I must apologize to you, for it was the RWP who replied about the keen thing.
When I read it (quickly) in the brown font, i KNEW that I had not said it and attributed it to YOUR thoughts.
Again, sorry, but it STILL does not change the fact that I did not say it.
If you are going to 'parse', do NOT scramble two peoples words into one sentence.
I suspect that Ryle is also guilty of the “category mistake” he lays at Descartes’ feet. I say this because in order for Ryle to make that argument he must assign the mind and brain to the same set, i.e. behavior. By putting them in the same set, he assigns equivalent properties to both.
The following boundary condition which you specified does not exist in my worldview:
You said: Well, then this mind is implemented in matter and not uh... spirit. So why shouldn't it be the real thing, especially if you cannot tell the two systems appart? If they are equivalent, you can't. And even if you can create an artificial brain, how can you know that what you observe is only the product of this material brain and not a non-temporal, non-spatial and non-corporeal mind that has just connected to this brain?
You said: So a cyclohexane molecule doesn't have information content? According to your definition every self-replicating molecule can be considered alive but some people think they're not and neither do they consider viruses to be alive. So again, at this level the terms "alive" and "not-alive" become rather fuzzy.
I see no fuzziness in that definition.
I was curious how you programmed a random number generator, i.e. what was used to seed it or whether you had found a way to circumvent that step. It has been a personal quest to find a "fair coin toss" equivalent seed number.
And I agree strongly that the terms random, deterministic and predictable are often used incorrectly. An ongoing point of contention between Wolfram and Chaitin (as I recall) is that Wolfram believes there is no such thing as a true random string, he would call all of them pseudo-random strings, even Chaitin's Omega. Again, as I recall, even Chaitin saw merit on the basis that every string is "caused."
Your second example threw me because the term "uniformly" didn't sit well with the phrase "tolerance epsilon" on first blush. LOL!
What is the difference between a simulation and the "real thing"? Not anecdotally, but fundamentally? Remember that your answer should square with the Invariance Theorem and related concepts (e.g. Turing equivalence).
That is why IMHO artificial intelligence may lead to a devise (sic) which cannot know that it is not alive.
Replace "cannot" with "might not" and I may agree. What does "alive" really mean, beyond being an arbitrary set of properties that a machine may or may not have? A bacterium can be obviously reduced to a marvelously intricate piece of machinery and it is most certainly alive (and apparently unaware of this fact). A virus sits on the boundary because its machinery is far less sophisticated, being nothing more than a punchcard for a cellular Jacquard's Loom that is capable of making the loom produce more punchcards. Animals are special in that they have a tissue matrix capable of encoding high order patterns (neural tissue), but these tissues are alive in the same sense that a bacterium is.
Any device with sufficient capability to encode high order patterns also has the capacity for self-awareness. Capacity and literal expression are two different things though, which quite a chasm betwixt them.
Evidently, the best seed for ordinary random number needs is the real time clock as you say.
I haven't had a need to do a Monte Carlo analysis but the concept is engaging. I really should though because it has to be a better alternative to the lotto "quick pick"
I realize that lotto is for people who aren't good at math; but, as they say, if you don't buy a ticket you can't win.
It would be more concise to assert that nobody has a solid idea as to the mechanisms behind QM, but that the consequences of QM from the standpoint of things like mind and computational theory are obvious.
Summary for the impatient: QM has only a single very important impact on any abstract conception of computational machinery. It fundamentally changes (and reduces) the characteristic time complexity of certain classes of computation. Nothing more, nothing less. From this, any theoretical consequences follow.
(NOTE: Time complexity is a weak property in many respects, as the fundamental concept of Turing equivalence still applies. Or to put it another way, novel systems that alter time complexity will necessarily be implementable on bog standard silicon.)
For many types of system Wolfram is right, and I would even be willing to grant as a reasonable premise that it applies to the system we exist in.
The key point is this though: For any system in which Wolfram is correct, there can be deterministic processes that cannot be perceived as anything but random within that system. It is the nature of the beast. Some of the confusion is in that there are processes we cannot treat as anything but random pragmatically even if we know they are deterministic mathematically.
A recurring problem is that many people do not understand the limits of application of general mathematics. There are a great many premises and assumptions underlying many of the more well-known bits of math, and for application in specific instances one has to make sure that the mathematics is constrained to appropriate premises and assumptions if one wants to make a definitive assertion. This is a problem even among people who are nominally mathematically savvy. If I had a nickel for every time the Halting Problem was improperly invoked...
I guess we should get the obligatory worldview statements out of the way because I know that you and I have a difference which cannot be broached.
This discussion started when Pinker’s views were brought to the table. His premise is that “the mind is what the brain does.” My worldview is to the contrary, that the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) is non-temporal, non-spatial and non-corporeal.
I suspect your worldview is much closer to, if not the same as, Pinkers and thus in your view there would be no functional difference between the simulation and the “real thing”. As the creator of the simulation you would know the difference between yourself and “it” – though in your worldview, it and you are equivalent.
In my worldview, there will never be a simulation which can equal tortoise and the “real” tortoise and I will never cease to exist, but your simulated tortoise would eventually no longer exist.
The best answers to the question revolve around the very point you raise, ”What does “alive” really mean, beyond being an arbitrary set of properties that a machine may or may not have?”
In the above article and a lot of others I’ve been reading these past few years, it is the information itself that sets a living entity apart from a non-living entity. A rock has no genetic code (information content) and does not communicate successfully among its members or with its environment or reproduce its information content (if it had any). Animals do. Ditto for plants, bacteria, viruses. Self-awareness is a non-issue by these definitions.
So if you were to create a strong A.I. device that has information content and which reproduces its information content and which communicates among its members and its environment – whether or not it is self-aware – it would be alive by that definition even though it did not come to be by an involuntary process.
Obviously, in my worldview the questions of "What is Life?" and "What is Mind?" are not the same.
But both subjects are quite interesting to me and I would love to hear your thoughts or definitions.
I see no fuzziness in that definition.
Amazing, isn't it, that our legislators would add an additional tax on you merely because you are bad at math!
(Actually, I win EVERYTIME I do not buy a ticket. No tax for me, thank you very much.)
And, has anyone calculated the odds of FINDING a winning ticket that someone has mis-read and thrown away?
So, is a computer virus alive?
I've been missing out on a great discussion! WRT the above italics, quoting tortoise: What does "alive" really mean? A-G, I think you are correct to observe the physicists and information scientists are more interested in this problem than (oddly enough) the biologists.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, in his outstanding Towards a Theology of Nature proposes a definition which rests on the field nature of the world. His key idea is the self-transcendence of all living beings is their most essential quality or characteristic. This, he maintains, is what separates living organisms from inorganic structures of whatever degree of complexity.
To be alive and to sustain life, an organism must counteract the law of entropy. If entropy is not counteracted, the organism will soon enough achieve the condition of "heat death." I.e., its life functions will cease.
As Pannenberg sees it, “the temporal self-transcendence of every living being is a specific phenomenon of organic life that separates it from inorganic structures.” This concept seems to subsume all of theoretical biologist Ervin Bauer’s life criteria: strong spontaneity, strong responsiveness, regulation from a global level (global “self-governance”). Indeed, it seems to me the idea of self-transcendence subsumes all these criteria, and places them into dynamic relations with each other. The ability to process information is implicit in the idea of self-transcendence.
Pannenberg also suggests that living creatures are categorically different than inorganic systems by virtue of the fact that they live “ecstatically,” that is, from outside or beyond themselves.
He writes, “An organism lives ‘in’ its environment. It not only needs and actively occupies a territory but it turns it into a means for its self-realization, it nourishes itself on its environment. In this sense, every organism lives beyond itself. Again it becomes evident that life is essentially ecstatic: it takes place in the environment of the organism much more than in itself….
“It would hardly be defensible of course to maintain that an organism is created by its environment, although an appropriate environment is a necessary condition for its existence. But there is still another aspect of its living beyond itself: by turning its environment into the place and means of its life, the organism relates itself at the same time to its own future and, more precisely, to a future of its own transformation. This is true of every act of self-creation and nourishing and developing itself, by regenerating and reproducing its life. By its drives an animal is related to, although not necessarily aware of, its individual future and to the future of its species.”
Self-transcendence is what acts against the law of entropy, just as Bauer conceives of the function of his life principle. Pannenberg is a field theorist; self-transcendence is manifested in an energy field which, when you boil it all down, is ultimately “responsible” for the creation of the life of individual organisms.
I thought these were fascinating ideas. I can imagine the living organism as a “self-transcendent” and “ecstatic,” given the field structure of nature. "Ecstatic" basically means the ability to move from a present state to a new state necessary to the preservation and maintenance of life (e.g., countering the effects of entropy, etc.). As “life criteria,” these ideas seem sound to me.
Thus it appears that life is in no way "arbitrary," but astonishingly dynamic, interconnected with environment, and sensitively able to govern the life process on a global basis. People who are interested in building "thinking machines" have got their work cut out for them. JMHO, FWIW.
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