> We are made out of functions<p>Not really true, our minds create approximate models of reality and in doing so divides the world into discrete objects that we can play with, but there's no reason to believe those discrete objects actually exist "out there" independent of our senses.<p>In this regard, even something as seemingly fundamental as arithmetic is just language. There's not really "two" "oranges".<p>I can write a function that explains what happens when a ball bounces off concrete, but nothing about that function <i>is</i> the ball bouncing off the concrete - the bouncing ball is not <i>made of</i> the function, nor is the function even a part of it. It's a totally outside replica that isn't even fully 1:1. Any attempt to completely model the ball or the concrete or the bouncing will fall short - they'll always be reductions.<p>So we're not made of functions. We don't know what we are. We use functions to model what's happening, but they're approximations or reductions of what it really is.
I was astounded when I read Matt Ridley's book "Genome" at just how <i>mechanical</i> cellular life is. The nucleus, loaded with DNA, is functioning like a ready-programmed CNC machine, or robot, or other programmable piece of hardware that interacts with the physical or chemical world.
<a href="https://latecomermag.com/article/a-holistic-view-of-the-cell/" rel="nofollow">https://latecomermag.com/article/a-holistic-view-of-the-cell...</a><p>There are isolated aspects of cells that are analogous to computation, but it would be extremely misleading to try and think of the cell as a computer or life as a computer, it is far messier than that, and in particular, the analogy implies some teleology or purpose that just isn't there.
At the beginning, it looked like this was headed for Wolfram land. Wolfram has the idea that, down at the bottom, the universe is a cellular automaton, like the Life game. He's done a lot of work on that, but hasn't reached any connection with the physical universe.<p>But no. It's off into early Turing and von Neumann land, which is more philosophical than useful.
This is a good read. Dr. Blaise Agüera y Arcas was a keynote speaker at <a href="https://attend.ieee.org/newera/program/" rel="nofollow">https://attend.ieee.org/newera/program/</a> here in Seattle a week ago but he didn't really get a chance to delve deeply into his position. During his slot there ended up being a lot of back-and-forth about whether AGI truly achieved or just seeing ACI, etc, among the folks from MS, Meta, Google, UW, and even <a href="https://www.dia.mil/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dia.mil/</a> rep.
I have to say I'm immediately skeptical when someone with a background in computation confidently declares that X (for any value of X) is fundamentally computation.
The human mind is an autonomous interlinked model building database of the world <a href="https://blog.jtoy.net/the-human-mind-is-an-autonomous-interlinked-model-building-database/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.jtoy.net/the-human-mind-is-an-autonomous-interl...</a>
This is a prime example of the fallacy where a "conceptual model" is considered reality. Humans always have created many models/abstractions to understand things around us but that doesn't mean that reality is those models/abstractions.
Is it only academia and Google Research that is funding these kind of artificial life passion papers? Wondering if anyone knows of real-world applications / companies working on them.
Oh my god that is maybe the most unexpected turn of all time. I almost hesitate to spoil it… suffice to say that the author is not who you think they are!<p>I was reading through to validate that it’s all pretty basic stuff without citations to any philosophers, which is true, but it’s great for what it is. No disagreements here. They even summarized the Imitation Game correctly, which is quite rare! (Most people frame it as “a computer is conscious when it can fool a human”, which is, somewhat impressively, missing the point in two ways at once)
“ It now seems clear, though, that by unifying thermodynamics with the theory of computation, we ought to be able to understand life as the predictable outcome of a statistical process, rather than regarding it uneasily as technically permitted, yet mysterious. Our artificial life experiments suggest that, when computation is possible, it will be a “dynamical attractor,” because replicating entities are more dynamically stable than non-replicating ones, and, as von Neumann showed, computation is required for replication”
Yaar apa ivan. In the beginning there was light. Don't change the facts, untill you find the counter part of computation.<p>For example, when I say, in the beginning there was light, Einstein law of light to matter and matter to light holds true.<p>Same way, how can or which other part can you relate computation to?