Context
I found this article from Berggrun’s magazine, Noema. I am interested in what they have to say about biological complexity that is relevant to a general audience.
Notes
- collective intelligence: “become more capable through increased scale. However, size alone is not enough. Intelligence is fundamentally social, powered by cooperation and the division of labor among many agents.”
- This motivation for focusing on the collective aspect is succinct. Scaling of intelligence (can be not rational but emotional, social, intuitive…) feels really weird when I try to look at my hand to imagine how it is made of cells and how those cells divided from one long time ago.
- Predictive intelligence: “it involves statistical modeling of the future (including one’s own future actions) given evolving knowledge, observations and feedback from the past.”
- I haven’t thought about the role of prediction that much expect in Bayes. I wonder how prediction matters or not in the people who just want to hold on to a traditional way of living, but in a changing world.
- “How could the intricacy of life ever arise, let alone persist, in a random environment? The answer: anything life-like that self-heals or reproduces is more ‘dynamically stable’ than something inert or non-living because a living entity (or its progeny) will still be around in the future, while anything inanimate degrades over time, succumbing to randomness.”
- I think this is a good question and a pretty nice starting answer. To develop and to heal is to make something over time. Is it happening for a reason?
- “Turing described “how tissue growth and differentiation could be implemented by cells capable of sensing and emitting chemical signals … a powerful form of analog computing.””
- Turing is using the computer as the ground metahor because that is what he makes. The mapping of embryos (where cells talk to each other) to computers is useful in making new computers.
- “learning from the environment, aggregating information and arranging it by sharing functional instructions through “copying and pasting” code that enables an organism to develop, reproduce and sustain itself.”
- this definition for computation is pretty general.