Posted on 06/15/2003 10:36:08 AM PDT by Alamo-Girl
Well, at least one can say that Grandpierre has some interesting ideas. To my mind, the above excerpt recalls the Mandelbrot set....
I wonder how this paper was received by Grandpierre's professional peers.
Yeah, shucks, ya cain't even get chaos outta just same ol' same ol' without God.
BTW, see the word "became" below. I would be prone to use this in my suspicions that Lucifer cum Satan had a hand in what we know as "creation," hence the chaos, hence animals eating other animals, hence the need for a garden, etc....
The Earth Became Without Form, and VoidHe Did Not Create a Chaos
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance: Hebrew and Chaldee Dictionary:
"1961. hayah ... to exist, i.e. be or become, come to pass."
"8414. tohuw ... to lie waste; a desolation (of surface)."
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was [or became — see Gen. 2:7; Strong's: hayah] without form [Strong's: tohuw], and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.[Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became [Strong's: hayah] a living soul.]
Isaiah 45:18 For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain [Strong's: tohuw] [RSV: he did not create a chaos], he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else.
Topical Bible Studies > God > This Study
fm. http://www.topical-bible-studies.org/02-0012.htm
I don't have a clue how Grandpierre's paper was received. The reason his paper captured my attention is it was the only viable attempt (known to me) to offer a mechanism for the evolution of consciousness, i.e. the discussion of evolution centers around the biological.
My "take" (which is described in the article) is different. But we each must arrive out our own understanding from the Word:
These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so. - Acts 17:11
The understanding doesn't come from education but from within - from the Word. My view is at the section in the article titled "Did God have a beginning?"
Hugs!!!
Without knowing the meaning of the newly coined term "bit pair of DNA code" the above isn't very meaningful. On the other hand, "some 3 billion bit pairs" and "a few gigabits" are about the same number.
Doctor Stochastic: On the other hand, "some 3 billion bit pairs" and "a few gigabits" are about the same number.
To the best of my knowledge, application coding has not been done in binary since the board wiring days (when I started.) We were thrilled with machine code and were downright giddy over Assembly. Then came an avalanche of higher level languages. From the field, if seemed as if every Computer Science postdoc was driven to “best” his predecessors.
In the example you gave earlier, an entire macro is board wired for a single code instruction to invoke. And the Iota example given by tortoise likewise equates to an entire phrase of Scheme which is a higher level language to the underlying Algol or Lisp etc.
In the end, the power of the interpreter, compiler or assembler determines which instructions will be executed on the board, which may be already wired for numerous macros. Gore3000 was doing as I had asked and normalized to the binary so we won't be talking apples and oranges.
In other words, I read his statement to say that the Microsoft programmers, using whatever language of choice - which is usually much lower than Lisp, e.g. C variants, Assembly - would use a comparable volume of higher level language to accomplish what we see in binary in the genetic code.
Newly coined or not it is apt to the discussion. We were discussing computers and the base pairs of DNA (the individual molecules which code the A, C, G, T not the codons which code in threes) are the smallest unit of code in DNA just as the yes/no or on/off state of a binary bit is the smallest coding unit in a computer from which all other code is derived. What I was pointing out was that just like computers need a multitude of code just to be able to do anything with those 0/1's bits, an organism needs a multitude of code to make anything of the ACGT bits. In fact, in computers you need programs to make the coding easier, that is why we are able with one instruction to copy millions of locations from one place to another. But this takes coding and when someone says that all you need is a few instructions to accomplish something, they are usually speaking of instructions in a high level language between which instruction and the actual computer are numerous lines of code. So what some in a facile way call a few rules are not because before those rules can be implemented you need an interpreter (which is a program) with lots of rules to make it usable in the natural language of the computer or the organism - the 0/1s or the ATCG's.
Now that you understand what was being said by me (if you did not already) I am sure you will agree with me that this 5-6 rules stuff of Wolfram is very unrealistic.
No. A one only needs 4 internal states and 7 symbols (I think this has been reduced to 4 & 5 respectively) to create a universal Turing machine. In cellular automata (Wolfram's example) the single automata 110 is sufficient to generate a UTM. In binary logic, the Sheffer stroke operator is sufficient to generate all other logical operators. (The Sheffer stroke is a "not both" operator.)
Ouch. Its hard to see how a Julian of up-papa-pweese Norwich might lose her calling.
Ortega has an interesting opening chapter in Man and Society where he shows the people talking non-stop about law, rights, the State, about the nation, about the public disposition to public defense, about good politics, about bad politics, about pacifism and war, about mankind, about social justice and injustice, about collectivism, capitalism, about socialism, liberalism, authority, about the individual and society, etc. etc. And the don't only talk about it in the paper, in the club, in the cafe, in their circle--they don't just talk, they discuss. And they don't just discuss, they argue about what that all these words imply. And in the contest it appears that people kill each other, by hundreds, thousands, millions. No doubt this contest appears more serious by some people than others. . . People talk, people talk about all these issues, but what people say about them fails to achieve that minimum of clarity without which this talk becomes dangerous. Talking brings with it certain consequences, and given the seriousness of such topics mentioned, the consequences are serious as well.
He then adds that this problem isn't just with the common folk, but that it exists among the professionals in the field. I reckon quoting such professionals for evidence, or employing their words is the naive pleasure of turning ignorance into a commodity.
cornelis, I fail to see where I have lost my calling. If there are any words spoken on this thread or any other, by me, that are hateful or mean-spirited toward any other poster or expert cited, group of people, etc. --- please point it out so that I may see the error to correct that failing.
But I don’t post the expert’s view, or use their terms, from ignorance. Indeed, it would be at least meaningless, if not foolish, if I did not already understand the experts’ view and the key terms. I am, after all, a participant in the debate.
For years on these threads, I have offered the best sources I could find to help facilitate discussions --- even when I don’t endorse the expert's view. Others I've pinged have done the same. The posting of such research information surely must help all of us to learn new things.
A Turing machine is a processor, nothing else. As I showed in post#513 and some following, that even the most advanced computers, far more advanced than Turing machines (and Turing machines can be implemented on just about any modern computer) only understand 0/1 or on/off. Whatever they do, has to be programmed into them, this requires numerous rules for them to do even simple processing. Just because the 'programming' is on a tape, a disk, on a chip or some other place does not make any difference, the programming, the high level language necessary for it to process rules, algorithms, data, or anything else is necessary for it to do anything useful. This alone requires more than 5-6 rules.
The problem of life, is not rules, but information, the creation of information not the description of it. Simple rules lead to simple results. We were all fascinated as kids with kaleidoscopes, they seemed to do fantastic things and make fantastic arrangements with just the turn of the wheel. However, after playing with it a bit, we saw that each one was pretty much the same to each other and eventually lost interest in it. This is what happens with simple rules, the sameness shows through. However, this is not what we see in life. As my example on post# 518 shows, the ways of living things are not only quite remarkable, but quite different in different species - even those which are clearly similar in many ways. Such things cannot be explained by simple rules. It requires information, very precise information which requires an intelligent being to create it.
No. That's the point of Wolfram's book.
"Hoffer's strongest words were for the intellectuals -- or rather, against the intellectuals. 'Intellectuals,' he said, 'cannot operate at room temperature.' Hype, moral melodrama, and sweeping visions were the way that intellectuals approached the problems of the world.
But that was not the way progress was usually achieved in America. 'Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.'
Since the American economy and society advanced with little or no role for the intelligentsia, it is hardly surprising that anti-Americanism flourishes among intellectuals. 'Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America,' Eric Hoffer said.
Some of the outrageous comments from intellectuals and academics, that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were somehow our own fault, bore out what Hoffer had said many years earlier.
Eric Hoffer never bought the claims of intellectuals to be for the common man. 'A ruling intelligentsia,' he said, 'whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed and wasted at will.'
One of the many conceits of contemporary intellectuals that Hoffer deflated was their nature cult. 'Almost all the books I read spoke worshipfully of nature,' he said, recalling his own personal experience as a migrant farm worker that was full of painful encounters with nature, which urban intellectuals worshipped from afar.
Hoffer saw in this exaltation of nature another aspect of intellectuals' elitist 'distaste for man.' Implicit in much that they say and do is 'the assumption that education readies a person for the task of reforming and reshaping humanity -- that is equips him to act as an engineer of souls and manufacturer of desirable human attributes.'
Eric Hoffer called it 'soul raping' -- an apt term for what goes on in too many schools today, where half-educated teachers treat the classroom as a place for them to shape children's attitudes and beliefs in a politically correct direction.
This is creating the next generation of 'true believers,' indoctrinated with ideologies that provide 'fact-proof screens from reality' in Hoffer's words. It is the antithesis of education."
But we also have words to convey truth when personal contact is not possible, and they are thus valuable. Sowell is an intellectual who uses words to convey truth. Your words are also sincere and have taught me much. While we may disagree at times as any 2 people will, I remain an avid fan and grateful for your fine mind and work. FWIW -- I thought it might be relevant.
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