Re: Folk Psychology and Social Convention

"Anthony Bucci" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Should this venture work, it would still not explain how
> all the necessary ingredients arose out of the primordial
> soup and then, most critically, ORGANIZED IN JUST THE
> RIGHT WAY.  Because it's not a matter of the right parts
> arising in the soup, it's a matter of the very special way
> those parts are put together and interoperate.  The latter
> is orders of magnitude harder to understand and explain.

On what evidence do you claim that there is a "just the
right way"?

More than likely, there are more "right ways" than we could
count in the remaining lifetime of the universe. Even among
current life on earth, there is a wide variety of chemical
bases on which the engines of life operate: light pumps,
sulpher pumps, oxygen pumps, iron pumps, heat puimps, to
name a few.

What we know from the uniform chirality of existing life at
the chemical level is that once a variety of life gets well
begun, it can force out the other options by hogging all the
resources.

> Perhaps you'd object less if I put it: compared to what we
> know about examples of life and life processes, we know
> next to nothing about how life itself arose.

Just what are you expecting to have arise in the way of rock
solid knowledge about the behavior of mixes of molecules
three billion years ago? We will never be able to say "This
is how it _did_ happen."; the best we will ever be able to do
is show a number of ways that it _could have_ happened.  If
you cannot be content with that as sufficient, science has
no hope to offer you of satisfaction, ever.

> When I said "our modern science does not study those
> questions, really"  here's what I mean.  The "really" is
> the keyword.

Certainly it is.  It's a weasel word allowing you to shift
your ground interminably to delay losing an argument in
which you have no valid standpoint, without ever having to
admit that you have received sufficient information to prove
you wrong.

> Of course people study those questions.  But in my
> estimation, to *really* study the questions, one has to do
> a lot of hard, basic research.

Amazingly enough, that's what all those people with the
glassware and the gas mixes and the corona discharges think
they are doing. That's what all the people designing and
calibrating evolutionary clocks against other sources of
ground truth to determine the relatedness and the time of
separation of various evolutionary tree branches think they
are doing.  Once again you are just preparing an infinite
source of weaseling opportunities to allow you to avoid
admitting defeat in a field where you haven't done your
homework.

> "Artificial Life" has existed since the 1850's (yes, I do
> mean *eighteen* fifties), yet has never borne fruit,

Nonsense:

http://www.ventrella.com/
http://www.frams.poznan.pl/
http://www.genarts.com/karl/papers/siggraph91.html
http://www.biota.org/ksims/
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/pstone/robosoccer.html
http://www.bpp.com.pl/bitozoa/bitozoa.htm
http://www.bpp.com.pl/bitozoa2/bitozoa2.html
http://alife.co.uk/
http://atoms.org.uk/

> and not for lack of trying.

It would _really_ be a good idea for you to stop making
pronouncements based on complete ignorance.

> Clearly this is a hard problem on which existing
> approaches have not succeeded.  Do we have some kind of
> magic now that will let us make some incremental leap from
> what we already know and land us in a place where we
> finally get it?  I'll gamble on "no" as an answer to that.
> I think we need a fundamentally new idea to crack the nut
> of artificial life (and by extension origins of life).  To
> get that idea requires an honest, fresh look at the
> problem and not a simple regurgitation of existing ideas
> and techniques.

And I think you would be better advised to keep up with
current work, expect no miracles, just the slow slogging
advances for which science is famous.

> So who, among the authors you cited, is getting right down
> to basics, to the brass tacks of life, and studying the
> problem anew from a novel angle?  Can you tell me to help
> me focus my reading?  Because if I had to bet on it, I'd
> put my money on "no one."

Do you really think I copied all those URLs so I could then
also read them for you?  Such laziness is what makes you
come up with wowsers like the ones above.  At a very
minimum, try to have the ambition to chew your own food.

xanthian.



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