On 10/5/2012 8:00 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 8:32 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 10/5/2012 4:56 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 1:32 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 10/5/2012 2:04 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
Dear john:
2012/10/4 John Clark <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
Alberto G. Corona <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> Wrote:
>> Mother Nature (Evolution) is a slow and stupid tinkerer,
it had
over 3 billion years to work on the problem but it couldn't
even
come up with a macroscopic part that could rotate in 360
degrees!
> First of all, 360 degrees rotation is present in the flagela
of the
bacteria, invented about 3800 million years ago
I know, that's why I said "macroscopic". It's easy to make if the
wheel is
microscopic because nutriments can just diffuse in and waste
products
diffuse out; but as parts get bigger the volume increases by the
cube of
the radius but the surface area only increases by the square, so
when
things get big diffusion just isn't good enough. Evolution never
figured
out how to do better and make a wheel large enough to see, but
people did.
I explained in a post above why evolution does not select weels. An
autonomous living being must be topologically connected, and weels are
not.
This is a neat consequence of the need of repairability. No autonomous
robot
with weels can work for long time without supoort.. This is explained in
detail somewhere above.
I can imagine a design in which wheels are connected to the circulatory
system
just as some vehicles are built with hydraulic motors in their wheels.
Or the
wheels might be separate organisms in a symbiotic relation. Those are
possible
- but it's too hard to get there from here. So you make the point
yourself,
evolution is constrained in ways that rational design is not.
Do we know that imagination doesn't use an evolutionary process (behind the
scenes)
to come up with new ideas? Could it be that our brains use evolutionary
techniques, combining different things we know in random ways and running
internal
testing and selection of those ideas, before they bubble up into an Ah-Ha
moment
that we become conscious of?
Do we have any reason to believe ideas reproduce with variation and then
those that
reproduce most successfully rise to consciousness? THAT would be a
Darwinian theory
of consciousness.
The only known implementations of artificial creativity involved genetic programming.
In fact, this computer used such techniques to invented patent-worthy designs:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.100.4146
When I try to conceive of how creativity works, it is hard for me to to imagine it could
be anything other than random permutation and cross pollination of existing ideas, which
must then be evaluated and the nonsensical ones pruned. New (good) ideas do not fall
from the sky, nor are they directly implied by the existing set of ideas. It seems then
that the process involved is to generate a bunch of new ideas (using methods similar to
the tools of evolution works), and then apply selection criteria to determine which are
the good ones and which are the useless ones.
This strikes me as disingenously stretching meaning to fit an argument. Yes, random
variation and recombination of ideas and selection according to some values is probably
how creativity works. But do you really think that shows "Evolution outshines reason"?
Aren't you overlooking the fact that reason does all this in imagination, symbolically,
not by reproducing and competing for resources and suffering and dying?
Brent
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