Posted by Eddie Sylvano on September 25, 2002, at 10:34:11
In reply to Re: addendum » Eddie Sylvano, posted by Mal on September 23, 2002, at 15:17:17
> Now genetic code- that is so fascinating to me... I may be missing the point, but I think you'll agree that a person is not a slave to his/her genetic code.
-----------------------------I tend to think about people as a running computer program (with the code being our DNA). One of the major tenets of programming is that you cannot get more information out of a system than you put into it. I think that most people will see that this makes sense. There's an inherent limit to how much you can compress and encode information.
That said, the human genome has a finite amount of information. This amount is obviously not enough to account for our teeming sea of behavioral and cerebral information. The complexity is due to the very elegant way in which our DNA operates. It's a program written through trial and error over billions of years, and in the most archaic fashion, which uses lots of simple rules in tandem to produce a higher level system of behavior (the body). The DNA is, in a sense, the "least you need to know" to get started as an organism. It's enough information for protein plans and body structure, and its translation in a human egg results in a secondary system.
The elegance is that this second system is itself imbued with a system of simple rules that describe how we will learn to learn. It's the level I mentioned earlier, that's looking for patterns, and pulling associated emotions. The concert of these secondary activities ultimately results in the topmost level, a functioning mind, which turns the stream of information it recieves into an adaptive model of the world, a personality, and creativity. If you wanted to be even more abstract, DNA is governed by a set of simple rules called physics (simple to nature, anyway), which life has exploited for its ultimate order. It's all simple rules resulting in more simple rules, all playing out, and it's ultimate output looks very orderly.
In this model, we're slaves to both our environment and our genes. Our genes define the rules we operate under, and our environment provides the information that we operate on, and the behavior that results. Different people operate on *ever* so slightly different rules, and with different information. It's hard to appreciate, given my crude definition of this setup, just how striking and diverse the results of running simple rules can be. The universe is essentially a lot of blips of energy that follow a finite number of simple rules.
One of the more unsettling conclusions that this brings me to is that free will isn't so free. If you were building a robot or a program, how would you provide for such a thing? It's logically impossible. Nature is predictable and reactionary at its base, and we're just higher level representations of nature. The best you could do is to cleverly simulate it.
poster:Eddie Sylvano
thread:1117
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20020829/msgs/1137.html