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What I think we're talking about is what defines life, the essential thing(s) that it does and which other things don't and which explains the most about it.
On a sidenote, I have a competing hypothesis to offer up. This idea is that life is a form of change. Life is organic, right? And organisms are different from everything else. Life changes to better fit its environment. Life also changes to fit its environment not so good, but hey, history is written by the winners and all that. So, yay change.
Also, information and information processing has been mentioned many time but (please correct me if I am wrong) no mention has been made of biophoton communication and processing.
I do not believe that my perspective from which i observe life in this case is determined to provide any kind of ultimate truth.
In other words i am sure that there are other definitions for the word life, that are of no less relevance.
For example i think that definitions based on purely philosophical concepts are necessary when laws are set up.
Your idea of life being change shows an understanding of the way things work that is close to Heraklit's "panta rei", meaning nothing else but "everything flows".
He realised in those early days that the way our world works is based on dynamics.
It's not a coincidence that the theory of selforganisation also has the names "chaos theory" and "theory of complex dynamic systems".
So you see how close you are in fact to the original topic.
Also the way you easily picked the points randomness and function and put them into the right context shows that you obviously have a very easy going and good understanding for this actually abstract topic.
Looking forward to more of your comments.
I didn't really catch what this concept of biophotons is.
Also i didn't find it in any dictionary. Do you maybe have a link that explains it? Maybe i'm just missing the logical link for understanding it.
The idea of intelligence is going through changes.
In these days we frequently hear the word swarm intelligence.
Once in a while I read the term organizational intelligence but it's not as popular as the first one. In discussions it always gets confused with collective Intelligence which means something completely different.
Collective Intelligence is about an accumulation of IQ. For example a company as an entitity is expected to behave more intelligently (than e.g. another one) when its employees have more intelligence to contribute . The participiants of the collective already carry the high IQ.
Even though IQ cannot simply be summed up (unfortunately), something like a partial accumulation might actually take place.
Organizational intelligence though is something completely different.
It takes place at an extremely low level.
Organizational intelligence is not an output of the participants' minds but much more a result of the way something is organized. Ants probably provide the most common example. They have a habit of following very simple rules without questioning it, accidently creating an effect which is an optimization method for finding the shortest way from A to B, a method that has been transferred into a formal system as so called ant algorithms.
These algorithms can easily be applied to robots having no further AI and no other functions than following just these simple algorithms.
Since these algorithms contain no such thing as a concept of what a shortest distance could mean, it is interesting to see that they still work as method to find the shortest distance.
This also shows that the ants do not need a concept of distance and shortest way but that the effect results from the way the system is organized.
A quite similar effect can be observed with evolutionary algorithms.
They are being used for solving problems which do not allow to find the optimum (e.g. for time reasons). Evolutionary algorithms find solutions that get close to the optimum.
Regardless if somebody wants to believe in a god being the designer of evolution, fact is that the effect of evolutionary algorithms results from the way the system is organized, making a central controlling unit obsolete.
But why call optimization methods intelligence?
Let's come back to the swarm intelligence. Here we have the same effect.
Keeping a big amount of living creatures together instead of having them spread in all directions and further having them all do more or less the same is an effort which would demand a high perfomance from a central controlling unit guiding the swarm with its single intelligence.
This is probably why this output is considered the result of some kind of intelligence.
Again we have the same effect:
It was possible to proof that keeping up the functionality of a swarm can be achieved with only a hand full of rules. Again you can apply these algorithms to robots or reconstruct the swarm behaviour in computer simulations to see how the effect shows up when mindless virtual units simply follow a couple of instructions.
The important thing to take note of here is that these mindless units or living creatures do not need to have the intention of creating that effect.
They do not need a concept of distances, optimizations, swarms or whatever.
In all these cases the individuals' behaviour results in an "intelligent" system behaviour.
In other words what we observe here is an emerging system intelligence.
The system "swarm" as an entity can show an intelligence which the individual may have no idea of.
I wouldn't say this should lead to too much optimism, because certainly there might also be cases in which the system swarm shows signs of stupidity which the individual has no idea of, but the point that I want to make is not whether or not human mankind can be saved...
So the fact that a "swarm" as an entity CAN show intelligent behaviour should not lead to believe that it MUST show intelligent behaviour.
First of all it's more than obvious that this kind of intelligence is actually far more primitive than anything that we connect to the word "mind".
Having realized that this intelligence is not a result of the participants' IQ but does also emerge when simulated by mindless virtual units, the next question I am asking is:
Why should it only be observed among intelligent/living creatures.
The fact that we can easily simulate these effects in a computer, shows that they are simply based on logical principles that could also appear in non-living systems.
In this case, would we call it intelligence?
People tend to say no.
They tend to demand something like a consciousness or an intention that motivates a behaviour to call it the result of intelligence, considering it the result of mind and/or reasoning.
The whole discussion about Searle's Chinese Room and the Turing-Test is an example of how this idea of intelligence dominates at least one branch of philosophy and actually is pretty dominating in peoples' minds in general.
For a complete understanding of the term intelligence all of these concepts definitely have to be taken into account, however my purpose is to talk about a different aspect of intelligence.
So whenever I use the word intelligence I do not refer to it as the output of mind or reasoning.
The developments in the field of Information technology have caused a slightly more liberal usage of the word intelligence, talking about strong and weak artificial intelligence.
The so called weak AI is interested in even the lowest units of intelligence.
Anything that could possibly be measured as a positive intelligent output is of interest for the weak AI, e.g. a simple algorithm that causes a group of machines to find the shortest distance to a target (antalgorithms) which can be considered a cognitive process.
In case of AI we have humans put this intelligence into the system and in case of ants we have living creatures being involved, so one could argue that this intelligent output can only appear where a more or less intelligent creature causes it from the background.
My hypothesis is that self-organization itself comes with the whole potential of intelligence, containing both: the molecules of intelligence and the glue that accumulates them to what we call mind.
And if somebody is curious about it, it would be my pleasure to explain how and why.
This is why becoming educated doesn't necessarily increase your intelligence. If you learn something and have no ability to relate it to other information, then you are really just a parrot.
On a sidenote, I have a competing hypothesis to offer up. This idea is that life is a form of change. Life is organic, right? And organisms are different from everything else. Life changes to better fit its environment. Life also changes to fit its environment not so good, but hey, history is written by the winners and all that. So, yay change. I don't know why I like this idea, [...]
There is an interesting concept which might be relevant to this thread, which is called 'consilience'. Edward Wilson, a biologist, wrote a book about it. As it happens he is also an expert at the self-organising capacities of ants.
that is why I referred to that book Consilienceby E.O. Wilson. I haven't read it but it looks relevant to this thread. Although I hasten to add he is a committed materialist who wishes to understand everything in terms of physical laws, which I don't believe is either possible or desirable, but it still seems a very interesting idea.
... yep, from what I understand, E.O. Wilson is committed to the idea that the real stops at matter and that everything else beyond is mere epiphenomenon ... what puzzles me about that stance in this century is that with our increasing knowledge of the quantum it appears incoherent ... that is, the idea is reductionist in nature, but not in execution - it currently chooses to stop at "matter" (a historical aberration that pre-dates the quantum) as the boundary of the real ... but in a quantum world, doesn't a fully executed reductionism imply that matter itself is mere epiphenomenon? - that the real stops at the quantum foam? - that determinism is as much a convenient fiction as consciousness? ...
hi paul-
i suspect everything is either real or epiphenomenal, it doesnt matter what it is called or how to define it-i think there is no separation.
can you elaborate a little on the underlined portion of the above quote please?
hi paul-
i suspect everything is either real or epiphenomenal, it doesnt matter what it is called or how to define it-i think there is no separation.
Interestingly i am having a discussion on a german forum that guides me to understand what you say. At least it might.
It may become more clear when you answer this question:
Do you see a difference between something being real or virtual ?
whether a thing is decohered or deterministic or real or virtual or epiphenomenal, only its form or state of being has changed-it hasnt changed, in essence nothing has changed.
and if there was a before when no matter existed, what difference would it make if whatever it was decohered from was still there? it would be equally real or important.