Re: Rosennean ideas used as a "weapon"?....exobiology

["Tim Gwinn" <***>]

Hi John M,

See interposed.

Regards,
Tim

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:*** Behalf Of John M
> Sent: Monday, September 01, 2003 4:04 PM
> To: ***
> Subject: Re: Rosennean ideas used as a "weapon"?....exobiology
>
>
> Tim wrote (among a lot of others including outer space stories):
> ^^^^^^^^^
> The ability to successfully predict the consequences of the
> introduction of
> new lifeforms not based on earthly evolutionary processes, whether via
> technological means or alien infestation, seems extremely unlikely.
> Labels such as "predator", "prey", "pathogen", rest on functional
> distinctions, and function in turn rests on what a thing entails, rather
> than what entails it.
> Therefore, even the most intensive study of an "alien" lifeform in
> isolation, or "under laboratory conditions", will fail to reveal the full
> functional potential of such an organism "in the wild".
> ^^^^^^^^^^^
> I want to look around right here on Earth. (We may be 'infiltrated from
> other universes, but that is a sci-fi religion. Why not stay simple?)
>
> We have the weirdest (wrong?) ideas about 'alien' lifeforms. IMO it is
> unpredictable, the 'aliens' are not wide-eyed humanoids in grey,
> they may be
> aberrant homo-like offsprings of regular humans by some unusual/esoteric
> developmental input. 'Aliens' may be virus-like, only causing such
> aberrations in us. (And I am not speaking about virus as HIV). An 'alien'
> process is cloning. I consider it a reductionist model of the natural
> procreation using a select part only. On the JCS list I just had a
> discussion with an MD about his thought-experiment of -as said -
> 'completely' artificially synthesized DNA in test-tube-procreation, then
> implanted into a female womb and he hypothesized about the so   developed
> psiche of the offspring as compared to quotidien babies. I had some
> questions (believe it or not<G>) how far he with the 'artificial'
> ingredient
> dares go, I would start at natural DNA and make a clone. He
> proposed simple
> molecules or even atoms. I said: they are natural products(!) so he should
> cook them up as the stars do, from some artificial plasma (energy?) to be
> consequent to his plan.
> Then again I questioned his next step, replenishing all missing natural
> developmental details (he wanted to eliminate) by a gestation
> under natural
> enzymes, hormones, nutrients, processes. He finally agreed that a gedanken
> experiment is a poor way to draw (hypothetical) conclusions.
>
> Why am I referring to that on this list? Cloning is a
> model-process, nobody
> knows how identical it gona be to the natural product, e.g. no
> "sheep-shrink" analyzed Dolly in sheepese about her emotional life.
> Was she a sheep-form zombie, or a 'real' sheep?
>
> I believe students close to Rosenism may have good arguments to
> refuse overstated conclusions from the "life-line" dreamers, rather than
> becoming apostles of it - even as accused to be such.


What do you mean by "the "life-line" dreamers"? I'm not familiar with this
term, or how it relates to Rosen.



> At this level of biogenetic ignorance I find no real threat of anybody
> accusing RR with anything like what had been said in this
> respect. IMO from
> his teachings (system?) only negatives can be drawn: how NOT?
>
> The other thread (on 2 lists) goes about 'conscious machines', not
> necessarily AI or AL(life) but other 'thinking, communicating' tools.
> There are opinions - not exactly Rosenites, but close - in favor of the
> machine-model concept, which I try to encourage cautiously. The
> misunderstandings go deeper: about the 'complexity': "language", the term:
> communication, the (limited or wide) access to the "world": as programmed
> vs. an unlimited source, etc. Is a machine an extension of the human
> capabilities, or a restriction? (IMO it is a restriction with extending
> certain features beyond our bodily limitations. )


Well, I don't think a question centered around "human capabilities"
(whetever that is supposed to mean) is useful. A machine might sort mail
much faster than a human, and some machines can lift far more than any
human. But such abilties do not entail very much else about the machine; in
particular, they cannot entail an ability of those machines to be conscious.

The approach of trying to cobble together a conscious being by assembling a
set of capabilities (i.e., behaviors or phenotypes) is what Rosen called
"mimesis". [EL ch. 4 - 8] Mimesis is based on the notion that if enough"
phenotypical aspects, or capabilities, of an organism are brought together
into one entity, that the assembled entity will then *be* one of those
organisms; and, if the organism in question is conscious, then the assembled
entity will also be conscious. (It is very closely related to the von
Neumann approach to complexity: if enough complication can be brought
together, then some threshold will be crossed into complexity.)

Mimesis rests on an assertion of complete fractionability - on material
reductionism - in order for it to even be attempted. So, mimesis is an
ill-conceived program unless one deeply believes in reductionism as a
universal physical principle.

Of course, with regard to machines in general, since they are mechanisms,
and not complex, they will be incapable of the necessary causal entailment
to be conscious or to be organisms at all. In particular, machines - as
computing devices - will lack the causal entailment necessary to implement
any kind of complex (noncomputable) inferential entailment. In other words,
they can't implement nonformalizable inferential processes such as natural
language.

A machine may be able to *approximate* such processes to some degree, but as
Rosen points out, such thinking is flawed: "This activity is a sophisticated
kind of curve-fitting, akin to the assertion that since a given curve can be
*approximated* by a polynomial, it must *be* a polynomial." [EL p. 269]


>
> Such topics do come up and we should take time to infiltrate them.  The
> majority of the highly learned participants of some lists (mostly
> name-professors of name-universities international) is faithfully
> reductionistic. Some, however, have a more open mind and may pick up
> (topical, even theoretical) encouragement. Then our references
> come helpful.
>
> A sideline to Judith's fears. Don't.
>
> John M
>