The Ends Of Life?

Tech Central Station ^ | July 30, 2002 | Rand Simberg

[stuartcr]

Not until someone proves they exist.

[beckett]

I stand by what I wrote above, but please indulge me and allow me to change a few phrases for clarity's sake, and also to make an additional point.

---

I see. You've held this "information" in your hand, have you? And did you then hand it off to someone else?

Information by definition is non-material. Even Pinker and the cognitive scientists who put such great stock in modular, algorithmic brain structures admit as much. It is a basic error to confuse information with its material carrier.

In GEB, Hofstadter talks about enzymes which "create new information by blindly (emphasis mine) shunting symbols in [DNA] strands. An enzyme, like a rule of inference in a formal system, blindly (emphasis mine) shunts symbols in strands without regard to any meaning which may lurk in those symbols. So there is a curious mixture of levels here. On the one hand, strands are acted upon, and therefore play the role of data; on the other hand, they also dictate the actions which are to be performed on the data, and therefore play the role of programs." (Gödel, Escher, Bach p 513) This curious self-reference, part of Hofstadter's theory of "strange loops" in both molecular biology and consciousness, constitutes a deep mystery.

Chaos theory, as it probes nature's norm --- nonlinearities --- is chipping away at the processes Hofstadter called strange "blind" loops, and finding Mandelbrot's exquisite order underneath, an order ill-suited to the attribute "blind."

I repeat my original claim. The boundary between material, linearly reducible phenomena and the non-materiality on the other side of chaotic noise is blurring, or perhaps it's more accurate to say that some leakage may be occurring. The possible implications of that leakage are awesome to contemplate. The fun has just begun.