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From: john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: The Sciences of the Artificial applied to Biology
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2025 09:04:48 -0700
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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.

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

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

Is an oyster intelligent?