Steve Grand wrote a book I just love, called Creation: Life and how to make it. Steve’s the creator of Creatures a popular computer game, kinda a cross between the Sims and Spore. In his highly readable book he posits
Dr. Frankenstein’s Creed:
“Life is not the stuff of which it is made – it is an emergent property of the aggregate arrangement of that stuff. Even the stuff itself is no more than an emergent property of a still smaller whirlpool of interactions. Living beings are high-order persistent phenomena, which endure through intelligent interaction with their environment. This intelligence is a product of multiple layers of feedback. An organism is therefore a localized network of feedback loops that ensures its own continuation.
Intelligence cannot be abstracted – we have to build a whole organism. Nether can intelligence exist in a vacuum – it has to be embedded in a self-consistent environment. Life is the sum total of all the feedback within the organism, and between the organism and it’s environment. The division between organism and environment is not a real boundary, but a convenience dreamt up by our own brains – the universe is really just a single jumble of interactions.
A computer cannot be intelligent or alive, Nor can a computer program. But a computer can be used to create a cyberspace. Inside that cyberspace we can construct first-order objects and use algorithms to emulate their behavior. These objects are not alive or intelligent either, but they can be pieced together to build a second-order assemblage that is. Our task is not to program in intelligent behavior, but to enable such behavior to emerge from simulated objects that embody the cybernetic properties from which life emerged in the natural world.
To complete the picture, we must ensure that the recipe for this emergent phenomenon is not hard-wired but is able to be passed on from generation to generation and modify itself in order to persist on longer timescales, as the environment changes. Our creature will be fully alive and intelligent only if its future lies in its own hands, and to give it this autonomy we must relinquish direct control of its design. In short, the plans for how to assemble our creatures should be coded in its genes.”
Now I know some will argue this is not formalized enough to be meaningful but to them I respond. “It’s a creed for god’s sake, get over yourself”. What blew me away, are the twin concepts of evolution and emergence in the first two paragraphs. Note: I have issues with the last sentence in the second paragraph since the issue of subjective vs. objective “reality” is not at all clear to my way of thinking. But put that aside. To think, the average human has 35K genes, you could almost look at them as lines of code and with these 35K worth of genes you get not only all the variety of the human race (this concept first struck me at my local grocery store; the same pool of genes created him, her and me? Get out of here!) But, more importantly, those genes having been and still being selected by evolutionary pressure, resulted in the human brain, perhaps the most complex entity known to, well, the human brain. Further, without evolutionary pressures there wouldn’t be intelligence, let alone the human brain. But of course, it’s not just humans that evolved, only because of competition, because the evolutionary landscape is constantly changing from the perspective of any one individual “persistent phenomenon” is there life.
So I got a myriad of questions but a couple come to mind.
Why do the patterns persist? I mean wouldn’t it be easier to just not struggle. Where does that universal urge to survive come from? Becasue, without the urge to survive, to reproduce, make more of oneself, the whole damn system falls apart. Now I know, one could say, “Well, the will to persist is there because it defines success. All the other approaches (the will to not persist, the will to watch lots of television, eat cheetos and never move) didn’t do so well. Only the results of the the will to persist are around to be seen. Okay, fair enough but here we get into emergence. There seems to be a movement towards complexity throughout the Universe. This movement is not only seen in entities with “will” but in non-willfull agents. Why? Where does that come from?
