From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of curtisdeltablues Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2011 7:39 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: David Bolinsky animates a cell | Video on TED.com
--- In [email protected] <mailto:FairfieldLife%40yahoogroups.com> , "Rick Archer" <rick@...> wrote: > > You don't see infinite intelligence at work here Curtis?: > http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bolinsky_animates_a_cell.html > Great video, thanks Rick. I love TED talks. He makes a better case for limited rather than infinite intelligence for me. Despite my enthusiasm for the brilliance of his use of arts integrated learning, which is bound to engage the student's brains more completely, I am also aware that this technique is only as scientifically accurate as the analogous visual language is used by the programmer. I was concerned with his use of the term "irreducible" at the beginning of his talk because this is not a principle in cellular biology that I know of. In fact it has been specifically refuted by the knowledge we have of the evolution of cells. So he may have tipped his hand too quickly and scientific accuracy should concern us moreso because our mind's ability to detect the difference between electromicroscopic images and these animations is absent. I kept thinking that I was seeing into a cell, which is wonderfully compelling but wrong. As a refutation of an idea of an infinite intelligence at work, I present this guy's body. An obvious result of our brain's evolution where his recently added rational thinking processes telling him to push away from the desk and jog around the building he works in occasionally has been trumped by the lower brain's attractions to high fat high sugar food in excess of his activity. So instead of dropping down and doing say 10 pushups every half hour, he has been compelled to download Twinkies and chips washed down by gallons of Mountain Dew which tricks the brain into believing it is nourishing like a ripe fruit would be if it was that sweet, hijacking his amigdalla and hippocampus into compelling him through dopamine rewards, beyond all reason, to continue a lifestyle that is killing him. And all of this with the perverse kicker that he "knows better"! Finite intelligence seems to cover the presentation for me. But that doesn't mean I didn't love it just as much. If the underlying case being made is that life is amazing and beyond our conscious comprehension, I am all in! Happy Thanksgiving, the holiday which demonstrates more than any other that our brains are a conflicting mess of impulses, higher and lower, unless of course you are putting out tofu turkey, in which case moderation is much easier since our primitive brains are not fooled by our conscious mind's absurd assertion that it is just as good as a heritage breed turkey who lived a life of fabulously nutritious feed until his last, inevitable, bad day! The same inevitable day we will all face despite our wonderful imaginations that our beliefs have altered the fact that we are much more like turkeys than the gods of our literature and computer animations. Finite not infinite in the end. I don't know whether intelligence is "infinite" or not, but to me, the universe does not look like it came about and is maintained through random collisions of little billiard balls. It seems to me that every level of creation, from the sub-atomic to the cosmic, animate and inanimate, is governed by inconceivable vast intelligence. Can't think of a better word for it, except perhaps "God", but that one carries a lot of baggage.
