From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2014 4:54 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
On 9/2/2014 10:35 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2014 6:58 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: AI Dooms Us
On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 2:45 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List
<[email protected]> wrote:
>> Amazing isn’t it. The elegance of self-assembling processes that can do so
>> much with so little input.
Yes, very amazing!
> I doubt 1000 lines of computer code is a large enough initial instruction set
> even for a highly self-generating system.
My intuition would say that you're right but my intuition would also say that
750 Meg is not enough information to make a human baby, and yet we know for a
fact that it is. So I must conclude that our intuition is not very good in
matters of this sort.
Point taken, but then a human baby is a plastic template for the individual to
emerge in; a fully formed adult human only develops after decades of experience
and learning. All of that living experience and cultural learning is not
contained inside that DNA bundle.
I disagree with your conclusion that epigenetic effects are of minor
consequence. For example a fetus developing in a low stress nourishing
environment will during embryogenesis – or so I am arguing – develop into a
different human being than that same child in an alternate universe where it is
exposed to high stress and low nourishment. The very rapid unfolding sequence
of DNA choreographed events that occurs during embryogenesis will unfold in a
different manner in each instance.
The rapidity of unfolding isn't really relevant to the information required.
It is not the rapidity – though embryogenesis is certainly rapid. What I am
pointing out is that epigenetic mechanisms alter which DNA actually gets
expressed. Instead of sequence A, sequence B becomes expressed.
Just think what you're saying from an information standpoint. At the most
simplistic level, stress (whatever that is for a fetus?) and nourishment are
two bits. Realistically it's maybe a half dozen bits. For those few bits to
make a significant difference in the baby can only happen if those significant
differences are already encoded in the DNA and the epigenetic bits are just
"picking out" one from another.
Exactly – but if one looks at the underlying original information in the DNA as
also being a dictionary of coding stretches – amongst other things.
Epigenetics (and the OS of the DNA itself for that matter that until recently
was dismissively called junk DNA) would function in a similar manner selecting
already existing words from a dictionary of words in order to assemble them
into meaningful sentences and paragraphs. Is the information content of the
resulting final output reducible to the word definitions contained in the
dictionary.
It is all in the sequencing. No doubt – and it is clearly so – an organisms DNA
also contains this kind of coding as well that switches on and off sequences,
but it also seems to be true that epigenetic factors – that is factors that are
external to the DNA itself can also control the expressed sequence.
Given the vagueness of things like "stress" it's hard to see how they can be
factors distinguishable from random effects like cosmic rays. Are there more
epigenetic effects in Denver and Mexico City?
Given the subtlety in which it operates epigenetic effects are for the most
part being discerned using statistical means to find correlations between
expressed phenotypes and common conditions. For example the recent study that
showed that there are inherited epigenetic effects on the grandchildren of
grandmothers who smoked tobacco while their children were developing in their
wombs.
Time will tell… eventually (and perhaps soon) I believe we will crack this code
operating over the code. That I believe provides life with a key ability to
respond – in a genetic manner to rapidly mutating environments. It is an extra
mechanism that works hand I hand with DNA switching expression on and off…
selecting from alternate exressions.
Implying there are alternate expressions already coded in that 750Mb.
>>> The same strand of DNA, depending on the dynamic action of the large number
>>> of transcription factors
>> A transcription factors is just a protein that binds to specific DNA
>> sequences. And where did the information come from to know what sequence of
>> amino acids will build that very important protein? From the original 750
>> Meg of course.
> From that original bundle of genetic code + environmental influences.
>>I don't know what you're talking about.
I am talking about epigenetic environmentally driven processes both acting to
control – to a degree -- which regions of DNA get expressed, and how these
regions finally get transcribed into mRNA, in what is a highly dynamic process
occurring within the cell’s nucleus -- with much snipping and splicing taking
place on the underlying original copy of the DNA being transcribed. Out of this
process occurring within the nucleus emerges the resulting mRNA that ultimately
is sent out to the ribosomes (where further front line editing may be taking
place,)
What a protein can do is a function of it's shape, and the shape of a
transcription factor, just like any other protein, is entirely determined by
its amino acid sequence, and that is entirely determined by the Messenger RNA
sequence, and that is entirely determined by the DNA sequence in the genome.
Proteins with the same amino acid sequence always fold up in exactly the same
way, at least under all environmental conditions found inside living cells. Yes
if environmental conditions are very extreme, if things are very hot or the pH
is super high or super low the protein can become denatured and fold up into
weird useless shapes, but such conditions are always fatal to life so it's
irrelevant. Under all lifelike conditions proteins always fold up in the exact
same way.
> 90% of the living things in a human body DO NOT have human DNA not by weight
> of course but by census
Our primary interest around here is the brain and what the brain does, mind;
and I don't see the relevance bacteria have to that. But if you want to include
the genome of E coli that's fine, there's plenty of unused space on that CD
for it.
There are a heck of lot more species inhabiting our guts than just one or two
species of E coli. They perform many services, including it is being discovered
working very closely with our own immune systems to warn their human host of
the presence of pathogens.
Yet "bubble boys" that are born with dysfunctional immune systems and are kept
in sterile environments seem perfectly human.
And die soon after they leave their bubble. Survival of the fittest does not
work in binary terms – yes/no. Say a randomly distributed group A has just a 1%
survival advantage over another group B; they begin with a 50/50 distribution
in the population, but over many generations selective pressure will favor
group A and it will begin to spread and become predominant.
A human with a healthy biotic meta-immune system in their gut has a higher
chance of surviving than a human with a ravaged and parasite infested gut micro
biotic flora & fauna. Candida leads to cancer (statistically speaking).
> The kind of flora and fauna we have in our guts in many ways determines who
> we are, what we think and what we desire.
So the key to consciousness and the factor that determines our personal
identity lies in our poo?
If you want to characterize your digestive process by what is defecated out as
waste I think you must not have a good grasp of what the digestive process is
all about. It is our primary interface with the external world. It is the
interface where we absorb the external world into our bodies internal world. It
even has its own tiny frontline brain – the enteric nervous system.
You think that the cravings for sugary foods, that the depression that often
occurs in sugar addicted people when they do not feed their habit is purely
human in origin and that the candida yeast that such persons are often infested
with has absolutely no role in this? There are numerous amazing animal studies
that prove that parasite species can control the behavior of their hosts – even
to the extent of making their hosts engage in behavior that is designed to get
them eaten as certain parasitic species do to insects they have infected (in
the Amazon I believe) making the host insects climb to the exposed tops of the
leaves where they become easy prey for birds of the species that is the next
host species in that parasites life cycle.
Just because a thought pops up in the brain does not mean that the mind is the
executive actor at the root of the desire or emotion. Parasites have evolved
very sophisticated chemical signaling that they use to influence their hosts.
> It affects out well-being
So would an inflamed toenail, but I don't think a investigation of that
affliction will bring much enlightenment on the nature of intelligence or
consciousness.
Apples and oranges. The internal chemical signaling that parasites engage in to
harness a hosts immune system or affect its mental state is the evolved
mechanism by which these parasitic species have learned to control their hosts.
An inflamed toenail is a wound and the pain is the organisms own nervous system
response.
As I said apples and oranges.
> I do not see a single human (or other eukaryote) only in terms of its own DNA
> + epigenetic meta-programming over the DNA base, but also in terms of the
> ecosystem that exists within.
That is where we differ and I think that is your fundamental error, you believe
you must understand everything before you can understand anything, in other
words you do what is becoming increasingly fashionable these days, you reject
reductionism in spite of it having worked so spectacularly well during the last
400 years. I don't.
John K Clark
If you need to saw a piece of lumber don’t use a hammer. Just because one tool
– reductionism has had spectacular success in increasing our understanding (and
I am not denying that it has) does not mean that it is always the appropriate
tool to use for the job.
In understanding the workings of complex multi-actor systems reductionist
approach has not produced spectacular results. A systems approach is required
as well – to complement the understanding of the parts with a different kind of
understanding of the dynamic working of the whole.
A systems approach is not a holistic approach. It's still reduction plus
synthesis. I'd say holism has never produced any results. What people
sometimes cite as holistic is really abstracting the parts of a system in a
different way, e.g. thermodynamics just worked with controllable variables and
neglected molecules.
I am an advocate of use the best tool for the job. A systems approach does make
use of reductionism, but it adds something different, a different optic
perhaps. It looks at the dynamic functioning whole (while also relying on the
best understanding of the fundamental parts). So yes, I agree with you, the
systems approach is not antithetical to the reductionist approach. It is a
different focus and viewpoint… a stepping back to study the dynamic processes
as they interact within the system being studied.
Surely this is important for something like understanding consciousness and
self-aware intelligence.
Yet, on Bruno's theory, consciousness is a binary attribute, all-or-nothing.
Intelligence has degrees and is no doubt relative environment and context, but
not consciousness (Although I disagree with Bruno on this, I think it may be
semantic difference since we seem to agree that there are qualitatively
different kinds of consciousness).
Brent
Consciousness seems more like a fuzzy emergent phenomena to me that has no hard
binary line between not being present and being present. For example, for the
sake of argument, suppose it is absent in a single ant; however when one steps
back to look at the ant colony as a whole and how adaptive and intelligent its
behavior can be, the ant colony as an entity seems rather more conscious.
Consciousness seems very much to be an emergent phenomena – IMO.
-Chris
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