Posted on 11/30/2004 6:21:11 PM PST by betty boop
Natural selection is also a transaction. If the information does not have to reside in the content of the message, then it makes no difference whether the source of variation is random, designed, pre-programmed, or whatever.
The "Meaning" of variation lies in the transaction that occurs when the message is or is not replicated.
IMHO, if we were to open the door to artificial intelligence in this discussion of what is life v non-life/death" - we would also be bringing intent to the table. And intent cannot be mentioned without looking to causation, e.g. God, collective consciousness, scientist.
Intention within natural life is evident - sometimes called the "struggle to survive" or the "will to live".
Perhaps, by applying information theory to molecular biology we are actually quantifying this distinguishing property of natural life.
At any rate, there is no known origin of information in space/time though we never got around to string theory or geometry. There is also the question whether the universe has a "will to live" which is expressed in the initial conditions - asymmetry between matter and anti-matter, physical laws and constants - all of which must be in a particular "balance" to lead to life. And if so, what caused this "will to live", this "beginning"?
In sum, if we turn to "intent" we are back to the heart of this thread, the original article - a meditation on the sum of theology, philosophy and science.
It seems like the more we concentrate on science with respect to life v non-life/death in natural systems - the more we are hit with obfuscation so perhaps concluding that such subjects are anathema to the doctrine of "scientific materialism" and redirecting to the original article is a very good idea...
This is a question that only applies to systems at the very high end, which is to say, ourselves.
At its most basic, there are two kinds of information that would apply to a living organism. There is the basic blueprint, which presumably is stored in its DNA, and then there are the signals by which its actions are directed or ordered. The signal that triggers an action, or the signal that informs the organism that an action is necessary, must be understood or it is not information. It must be understood or the action doesn't take place and the organism fails to perform its function and eventually dies.
This means that there must be a basic protocol built in which defines the kind of signal that is expected and the activity that will result from it. This is designed-in at the most basic level or there is no organism.
The kind of communications you are talking about is at a much higher level and is not the kind that defines living versus non-living.
In most applications of the model to evolution theory, noise is treated as the path of mutation. Environmental (non-living, perhaps harmonic) pressures also contribute to noise. Noise can be either destructive or constructive.
Natural selection however also has the feature of death which is a "higher" aspect to the information model. IOW, if the message changes in such a way that the receivers or subsequent broadcasting sources perish, then nature has made a selection against the message. The converse would be true also.
The quote is from Levis and Lewontin's The Dialectical Biologist, in which the authors "take a Marxist dialectical approach to examine the way and shape of contemporary biology." (Oh goody....) The context in which the quotation appeared was Rod Swenson's article "Thermodynamics, Evolution, and Behavior" (1997):
"With the physics of Newton the world consisted of passive particles that had to be ordered, but with Boltzmann's view the physical world was not just assumed to be 'dead' or passive, but constantly working to destroy order. Given this view, it is 'no surprise,' in the words of Levins and Lewontin (1985, p. 19) 'that evolutionists [came to] believe organic evolution to be the negation of physical evolution.' As Ronald Fisher (1930/1958, p. 39), one of the founders of neo-Darwinism, wrote about the apparent incommensurability between living things and their environments, between biology and physics, or, more particularly, between evolution and thermodynamics, 'entropy changes lead to a progressive disorganization of the physical world...while evolutionary changes [produce] progressively higher organization...'."
Apparently the view that Swenson attributes to Levis/Lewontin is that natural selection alone is the principle that reverses the inexorable descent of the universe into total disorder, chaos. The view makes the physical laws (particularly thermodynamics)"the enemy" of biological systems, instead of their facilitator. Apparently the subject of life qua life is not treated. It has been taken for granted and reduced to natural selection, that process which "reorders" what would otherwise be a disintegrating world. Chomsky is a Marxist, too; as you note, his analysis of language "only works on well formed sentences and completely disregards quirks of language such as connotation." I have generally observed Marxists as a class to have this strange and annoying habit of dropping all matters that do not fit their preconceived notions down the dumper. So if a Marxist tells me he's a scientist, I take that declaration with a grain of salt....
It seems to me that Levis, Lewontin, Chomsky (and let's add Pinker and Dawkins to the list) are better Marxists than they are scientists. To dump the evolution of the universe into a "dialectical process" strikes me as extraordinarily "doctrinaire."
Personally, I hope we'll return to the second law in due course....
Actually, death is the case in point. Where natural life ends, physical laws reign supreme. So the life cannot be only the material body.
No. Not as used by biologists. Evolution merely means change (of allele frequencies to be more specific.)
(“Higher” also suggests the idea of an “end” in the sense of a rational or objective measure by which something can be adjudged ‘higher” or “lower.”)
"Higher" or "lower" are purely subjective terms; not biological terms. Lines of descent from ancestors are only that; bull snakes and dodos share ancestry, but it's not clear how "higher" or "lower" could apply.
Selection (by deletion of an individual) may either increase or decrease the "information content" of a group of individuals. The deletion of one individual boosts the chances of other individuals to reproduce (at least statistically and if existence is equivalent to reproduction, etc.)
For example if there are 5 "genes" and 10 individuals such that 2 carry each gene: (2,2,2,2,2); then deletion of a single individual (for example one of the first) gives a population of (1,2,2,2,2). The same statistical result could obtain by adding other individuals giving (2,4,4,4,4) which has the same entropy.
They would have been executed under Stalin whose regime was extremly anti-Darwin. I would guess that L&L would claim that Stalin wasn't a "True Marxist" because he rejected evolution.
If some version of a quantum computer comes into existence and is in essence, pure mind, will it be a living organism? And is that what some humans already are? There is a great gap in human intelligences, yet we consider all biological humans as "living", though in reality some live short brutish lives, and others, such as Hawking, rise above biological constraints and live in a world of thought that perhaps most humans, let alone beasts, could never contemplate even if educated. Would a thinking quantum computer be superior to mankind? If a qc is conceivable, then why is the concept of God, as pure mind, inconceivable?
There is no relationship between intelligence and living systems. The vast majority of living systems on this planet are approximately as dumb as a rock, "intelligence" so simple that what intelligence it has can be trivially simulated on a computer without any particularly special algorithms.
The hard AI guys need to define intelligence, in a mathematically rigorous sense. You cannot solve a problem when you do not know the question. After that, it is just a difficult engineering problem. And as I've stated in the past, a mathematical definition of intelligence that most everyone can get behind has only been around for several years. 20th century AI research was baseless, in a theoretical mathematics sense.
Some people think coral is a rock; a kindt of reefer madness.
Quantum computers are indistinguishable from traditional silicon for these purposes. You cannot run any algorithms on a quantum computer that you could not already run on normal silicon, though a subset of operations will run much faster. So quantum computing gives us nothing, as far as intelligence is concerned.
The human mind is pretty apparently a poor approximation of pure optimal intellect. But in a world of donkey carts, even an old beater Chevy is a major step up.
A quantum computer can never be pure mind because it must exist in space/time. Anything corporeal cannot be pure mind or consciousness.
We can however envision entities beyond space/time. On a practical note, mathematical structures are not corporeal. Qualia - likes and dislikes, pain and pleasure - are not corporeal. Platonic forms - chairness, threeness, redness - are not corporeal.
Information is not corporeal either, though it is manifest in space/time as messages, channels, receivers, sources, encoders, decoders. The will to live is not corporeal. The mind or consciousness is not corporeal. The soul or spirit is not corporeal.
Any of the above four items one might choose to describe the difference between life and non-life/death is not corporeal.
And most importantly and certainly - GOD is not corporeal.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the number of genes required to encode a human being is not orders of magnitude more than that required to encode a bacterium.
Complexity is the difference. It is not generally acceptable to say an amoeba and a human have the same level of complexity.
The contention starts when the combatants try to define the complexity.
On the one hand are those who see complexity as least description: Kolmogorov complexity, self-organizing complexity, physical complexity. On the other hand are those who see complexity as least time: functional complexity, irreducible complexity or punctuated equilibrium.
But to deny there is a "higher" or "lower" structure of natural living organisms over time is to deny complexity altogether and cast evolutionary biology as a laughable ideology under color of science.
Marxism is more comfortable with ID than with natural selection. Marxism assumes a natural direction of change, even a final stable state.
Are you saying the blueprint has more elements? What are you saying? I'm sure there are differences in the length of the genome for various species, but I'm not convinced the human genome is the longest.
The difference between the amoeba and the human is not in the length of DNA but in the complexity of the organism. A better example might be a Chimpanzee to a human.
Again, I return to information theory which lends itself extremely well to quantifying complexity.
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