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Hi
Judith,
That makes sense,
overall. I think of it as the spaceprobe extending and enhancing the
sensory range of the humans who then analyze and evaluate the data
reported. In my questions I was thinking of the extreme case
where a spaceprobe would have all it needs in order to make a
yes/no evaluation packed onboard. So, it would arrive on planet X, and send a
radio message back "yes, there is life here", without a human analysis of the
data.
One could
say that the human analysis is present - it has simply been prepackaged
into the spaceprobe along with the sensory tools. I suppose then my question
could be reframed as: Could a mechanism contain the required analytic abilities
needed to detect a complex system? I suppose another way to say it is: Could we
stuff enough of our mind into a mechanism in order to detect complexity,
or would that requirement exceed the capability of a
mechanism?
Regards,
Tim
P.S. - Will your
ISSS talk be posted somewhere?
Tim Gwinn
wrote: I think the hypothetical question I posed also has some broader
implications:. Two that come to mind are:
- What would
it mean to be able to detect things like 'metabolism' and 'repair'?
What would constitute the observables our test equipment would have to
look for? (This seems closely related to the recent topic of
'process'.)
- Test
equipment that is a mechanism (in the Rosennean sense) could certainly be
built to detect various aspects of life, but can a mechanism detect a
complex system, or can the complexity in a system (e.g., the
closed loops of functional organization in an organism) only be
detected by another complex system?
While the testing equipment, itself,
would be mechanistic, it is actually the chimerical system of human/machine
which would be doing the evaluating. The inconsistencies we see in computer
systems, with regards to "simple" vs "complex" and the tantalizing glimpses of
what look like true intelligence, are actually glimpses of our own
intelligence which we have grafted, in chunks, into these machines. Such
technology is, by itself, simple (in the Rosennean sense that my father
developed), but computers would not be able to be fully analyzed unless their
context is taken into account, and their context is US, and of course we
are complex. Because this is true, all the attempts at designation and
definition become blurred. Incidentally, these issues were discussed at the
ISSS conference-- generated by attempts to define consciousness and
intelligence, such that we would be able to know when we create it
artificially in computers. My father's notion of chimera is one I think is
essential in that discussion.
Judith
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