The Future is in The CODE
Cycad plant with cone – from a walk around the neighborhood
A thought that occurred to me on my walk this morning (maybe reading this interesting biography of Philip K. Dick, and this interesting article – Divine Interference – about him last night influenced me):
How does biological information differ from computer information?
How are they defined in those respective fields?
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Ohh! I actually have talked to classmates about writing a script for an amazing movie related to this subject!!! We’ll see what happens!
Can’t wait to see it. Or read it.
I hope you and your classmates can take that computational biology knowledge you are at learning at Stanford and apply it towards re-engineering the human genome. Specifically, the neurological equipment of Homo sapiens needs to be tweaked a bit: there seems to be some sort of huge bug in our program that causes a divisiveness in our thought processes such that we end up destroying so much life on the planet, and that causes us to be violent towards ourselves and each other. A neurotic species, if you will. Can you do that?
Oh – I should post an excerpt from the Philip K. Dick article I linked to in my original post. It helps the reader see why my imagination was spurred to think about the link or differences between biological and computer information (other than I tend to wonder about taht kind of thing anyway):
Dick experienced a remarkable series of visions, hallucinations, and dreams, many of which centered around VALIS, a “Vast Active Living Intelligence System” that he defined in his 1980 novel of the same name as a “spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex…tending to progressively subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information.”
My take on the question: I think computers and living things, including brains/nervous systems, work on completely different principles. Computers are symbol crunchers and fast switches; living things are not. I’m not sure what livings things are (ultimately), but I know there is more intelligence in a single cell in your finger than in all the scientific knowledge of biology in the world combined. Proof of this: Could all the biologists in the world working together create a single living cell from scratch? No.
I have a question: I wear an insulin pump, a machine that moniters the stream of insulin pulsing through my body. true, I control IT, I put IT in my body. But it is a PART of me. It is IN me. Does this make me part machine?
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