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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: The Sciences of the Artificial applied to Biology
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2025 03:23:59 +1000
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On 12/07/2025 2:04 am, john larkin wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Jul 2025 11:49:03 -0400, Phil Hobbs
> <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
> 
>> On 2025-07-10 14:04, john larkin wrote:
>>> On Wed, 09 Jul 2025 19:38:41 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I forgot to mention that he Sciences of the Artificial digs deep into
>>>> why living things (even microscopic ones) have distinct organs and
>>>> often components within such organs, versus the organism being a mass
>>>> of tissue that somehow does everything.  The driver is efficiency and
>>>> simplicity.
>>>>
>>>> This assumes that life has already emerged in some unspecified way,
>>>> and goes from there.  This is a different approach than Dawkin's
>>>> Blind-Watchmaker arguments.
>>>>
>>>> Joe
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Ref:  "Simon_Herbert_A_The_Sciences_of_the_Artificial_3rd_ed" - The
>>>> Architecture of Complexity.  New copies are available from MIT Press.
>>>
>>> Even single-cell critters have levels of intelligence. Some people
>>> suggest some level of consciousness.
>>>
>>> The book sounds cool.
>>>
>>> Dawkin says he is an atheist above anything else. So he naturally
>>> hides from anything that's not primitive neo-Darwinism.
>>>
>>
>> That's just moving the goal posts.  One gets people nowadays talking
>> about different people's gut biomes 'communicating' with each other.  If
>> all they mean is that there's some poorly-qnantified mauual influence,
>> okay, but I get the impression they often mean more than that.
>>
>> I think it's unhelpful to conflate mere mutual influence with
>> intelligence---even calling it "information exchange" imports the idea
>> of meaning, which requires actual intelligence.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Phil Hobbs
> 
> Even single-cell critters (including our own cells) have
> extraordinarily complex behavior. And nobody understands how our
> brains work.

But we are working on it. And "large language models" produce a pretty 
coherent approximation to real speech, though nobody can spell out 
exactly why.

> What I'm suggesting is that we not exclude thinking about possible
> biological mechanisms for theological reasons.

Nobody sane does. Creationists - the "intelligent design" crew - want 
added extra mystery so they can import god via the back door.

> What's your definition of "actual intelligence" ?  I know that most of
> what I do (and invent) is done unconsiously.

But people who do it better than you do think harder about what they 
give their sub-conscious processing to chew on.

Intelligence is one of those things that is hard to define, but 
tolerably easy to recognise, rather like beauty.

> Is an oyster intelligent?

Barely. But Donald Trump is quite intelligent, but not intelligent 
enough to acquire all the background knowledge he needs to make sound 
decisions. Imposing tariffs on the non-existent exports from Heard 
Island - which is only inhabited by penguins and seals - wasn't all that 
clever.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney