genetic information (was Re: Computation and Human Experience(RRE)

Chris Burford cburford at gn.apc.org
Thu Jun 22 00:29:32 PDT 2000


At 10:17 21/06/00 -0700, James wrote:


> >
> > But why assume a body is a machine in the first
> > place?
> >
>
>Why not? It takes in energy, it eliminates waste, it
>breaks, it needs repair. It operates according to the
>same physical laws that every other machine does

Absolutely not. This is the fallacy that the natural world is analogous to clockwork machinery.

The heart for example is not like a machine much as we would like to believe it. Its rhythms are best analysed by chaos theory. It has a certain vulnerability to flip into another relatively stable phase state, such as ventricular fibrillation or asystole. When this happens to you, you may well sense that something drastic has gone wrong qualitatively and you may be close to death.

More generally, living natural systems are self-organising systems which are relatively stable most of the time, but can flip into a phase shift. Much as the Benedictine monks thought they were glorifying God with their suberb time mechanisms for controlling the labour of their workforce, in the thirteenth century, the feature of machinery is that it is so designed that each cog is massively stable relative to what it has to do, and does not equlibrate chaotically with the external environment. Human clockwork and other machinery operates with a regularity that is *unlike* that of planetary bodies for example.

This fundamental difference of perspective is a very deep issue and explains why in the face of empirical fact like planetary motion the data can be interpreted two ways.

But could Newton explain why there is an asteroid belt in the solar system. Did he understand that the three body problem is unsolvable in any strictly predictable way? No.

Modern science is now giving us a truer, in a sense a more dialectical, understanding of nature.

Chris Burford

London



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