--{ Samil's Book Review }--

CREATION

Life and How to Make it

Steve Grand, 2001, Harvard University Press

Created: October 12^th, 2003 Sunday 16:28, Ankara

This book is related to artificial intelligence and has a novel perspective about what life is. Notes that I took while reading:

" The notion that life resides in some special substance, which is excused from compliance with the normal laws of physics, is called vitalism...Vitalism is not yet dead by any means, but the vital essence continues to flee into whatever phenomenal realm currently lies just beyond our understanding." (p.3)
" We are less certain about whether it is wrong to kill a cow or an ant or a bacterium...If life is reduced to mere clockwork, where does that leave our sense of morality?...our ability to understand has failed to keep pace with our ability to act." (p.6)
" Skills can be learned only through personal experience, and insights are much the same. Where new knowledge is simply added to one's exisiting mental store, insights bring understanding, and understanding changes one's whole being." (p.9)
" More often than not the answers just occur to us in some mysterious way, and we use logic only in retrospect as a means of justifying our conclusions to others or to ourselves." (p.18)
" Language provides an important part of our toolkit for conscious thought. For many of us it is very difficult to think consciously without speaking words in our head. Without the right tools, it is very difficult to do an effective job." (p.24)
" ...a cloud is just a name we give to a region of space through which moist air passes and momentarily renders its water content visible" (p.28)
" ...you are like a cloud: something that persists over long periods, while simultaneously being in flux. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important. " (p.30)
" A ripple is a pattern that persists by means of propagation - it copies itself forward in space and time." (p.35)
" Why things persist is a question with only a few answers: phenomena persist because they are either inherently stable in an absolute sense, or because they are more stable than other phenomena with which they are somehow competing...if you think of light and other subatomic particles as wave-like propagating disturbances, then the very components of which the universe is built are nothing more than persistent localized distortions of the basic fields that make up all of space. Stuff is clearly not as solid as it looks." (p.36)
" The universe is not made of stuff but of events and relationships." (p.41)
" Every living creature is a vast autocatalytic network, taking in raw materials from outside and making more of itself, completely automatically as a consequence of the nature of its ingredients. When living things act as autocatalytic networks, we call the process metabolism...They are self maintaining patterns in space and time in their own right - persistent eddies in a flowing stream of molecules and ions." (p.49)
" A single altered molecule will therefore 'survive' in the population of molecules only if it changes the network in such a way that the same system now produces more copies of this new molecule, without at the same time destroying the network's ability to synthesize all its other constituents...Today's living organisms are certainly autocatalytic networks, but they do not rely on the network to be its own description: they store the description separately from the function, in their DNA." (p.54)
" Patterns that persist by metabolizing and reproducing are alive." (p.56)
" When a relatively complex result arises out of simple interactions between members of a population...it is known as emergent behaviour...Yet some scientists dispute that these phenomena are real at all, and think they are a product of our own desire to categorize things, or that they are a surprise to us only because we are not clever enough to have predicted their occurence." (p.62)
" Really, there is only one huge emergent phenomena in existence, called the universe. Inside this there are regions of smaller, more or less independent, interacting loops of cause and effect that we think of as things in their own right." (p.64)
" The mistake is to start with the outward behaviour you want to see, and work back toward some equation that produces it, rather than start with the fundamental physical processes that are at work, and from them build outwards to generate the behaviour. A good deal of virtual-reality software is like this, unfortunately - it starts with how things should look and then tries to bolt on code for how it should behave." (p.72)
" ...structure must generate function." (p.73)
" My general argument is that a computer simulation of an entity is not in itself a real manifestation of this entity, and yet higher levels of organization built from such entities have, under the right cirumstances, a genuine right to be declared examples of the things they simulate...Some systems we might want to model are brittle. That is to say, a tiny error in the fidelity of the first-order model might be magnified out of all proprotion by the time we reach the second-order level." (p.79)
" Systems that show the same kinds of global behaviour despite small differences in their internal structure might be described as robust." (p.80)
" Without the need for food, metabolism is pointless; without any difficulty of obtaining it (or some similar stress), intelligence will not emerge." (p.89)
" Most biological systems automatically adjust themselves so that they are at rest when the world is in its local average." (p.104)
" A thing is elegant if it maximizes some measure of utility while minimizing the information content...Something is complex if it contains a great deal of information that has high utility, while something that contains a lot of useless or meaningless information is simply complicated. " (p.118)
" This is the way organisms work. There is no architect, and no master controller telling the system what to do. There are just vast numbers of small independent entities that respond to signals as and when it suits them, and emit new signals whose destination they do not know. Top-down control leads to complexity explosions, because something somewhere has to be in charge of the whole system, and how much this master controller needs to know increases exponentially with the number of components in the system. Living systems are bottom-up: no part knows or cares what its role is in the whole, but the whole still emerges from the cacophony of these zillions of mindless loops of cause and effect." (p.119)
" Our task is not to program in intelligent behaviour, but to enable such behaviour to emerge from simulated objects that embody the cybernetic properties from which life emerged in the natural world." (p.147)
" ...complex adaptive systems cannot be dictated to - you have to learn how to go with the flow and nudge individual components in order to encourage the system to go in the direction you want it." (p.149)
" You and I do not live in the real world at all: we live in a virtual world inside our heads. Most of the time this dream-world is closely synchronized to external reality, but sometimes it is free to live out a different future of its own. There is plenty of evidence to show that we are not really conscious of how things are, but only of how we think they are, in our own models of the world...The program is all there, but it lacks good data." (p.213)
" So if I am a product of my brain's imagination, can I be a product of yours too?" (p.218)