Social and Cultural

Culture has been defined as the symbolic order that is, the physique of thoughts prescriptive of social relational order. "Thinking" has similarly been defined as the symbolic modeling of experience continually with the potentials for suggesting an alternative order of expertise. I define magic as embodying the purported approaches for fulfilling an alternative order of reality: the techniques for producing our dreams come accurate fulfilling our dreams in what we understand to the "genuine world."

Sociologists assure us that only man creates symbols and simulates concrete relational order by means of symbolic systems of order. Sociologists proudly proclaim man the only culture creating agent in nature but I propose that we will need a radical rethinking of our picture of the function of DNA in bio-evolutionary history if we will progress beyond the outmoded conceptualization which continues to hold sway amongst biologists in spite of advances in facts technology because the neo-Darwinian synthesis was initial formulated.

My proposal to biological scientists is that DNA might possibly, on closer examination of its molecular order, turn out to be a molecular laptop or computer nanomachine operating on an advanced statespace intelligence algorithm of some sort. The science of genetics need take into consideration, seriously, the possibility that so-referred to as junk DNA might incorporate some form of intelligence code. It is considerable that nature had, in the symbolic system of the DNA molecule, inside the boundaries of the sociological definition, been "thinking," producing and transmitting culture for eons prior to man appeared. Man may well only represent a new, previously unexplored possibility for All-natural Intelligence in the art of culture creation and transmission.

The self-imposed naivete of biological believed face-to-face with evidence of a pre-human technique for symbolic modeling of physical relational order is exceptional. Could All-natural Intelligence have revealed its hands more plainly to Watson and Crick, to Beadle and Tatum?

A yawning gap separates the mere existence of a macro-molecule and the exploitation of its chain structure in a method for symbolic modeling of concrete relational order. It is a single thing to have the alphabets it is a radically completely different factor to use the alphabets to invent a language by assigning references or "which means" to otherwise meaningless symbols!

The genetic method accommodates the possibility, in what biologists carelessly believe are random mutations, for suggestion of option bio-physical orders. This is the essence of divergent thinking, creativity and innovation in intelligence systems.

How lengthy will it take for molecular biologists to appreciate that the genetic system could possibly incorporate some form of syntax-driven intelligence code?

Steven Pinker, in his How The Thoughts Works, attempted a operating definition of intelligence. He was of the opinion that intelligence comes with a unique "commodity:" information and that what defines intelligent function ultimately is information and facts processing capability.

Guided by the criterion of data processing functional capacity, Pinker confidently ascribes intelligence to appropriately programmed machines and the human brain which programs the machines, but fails, curiously, to extend the identical standard of judgment to the genetic machinery of living issues which has accomplished basically all, and far more than computer system machines and human minds have so far completed: come across workable solutions to the array of ill-posed inverse issues that must have been encountered in evolutionary history.

A handful of insightful commentators, casting a suspicious eye on the efficiency of the genetic machinery of life, have commented that the molecular genetic system can be likened to a laptop or computer machine, but I have persistently argued that the molecular genetic technique is not like a laptop machine but, rather, DNA is a systems style and implementation nanorobot made up of molecular hardware parts, with some form of statespace intelligence algorithm written into the structure its macromolecule. To refer to DNA as an intelligent bio-systems design and implementation nanorobot is not to employ a metaphor but in all probability, as may be confirmed, to speak literally.

"Whodunit?" is one other question completely. But long standing philosophical prejudice, in an problem of this nature, must not continue to preserve us from examining possibilities which could lead to a revolution in our insight into a incredibly significant and vexing dilemma of life and its origins.

What we know about DNA function is sufficient for the confident prediction that evaluation of relevant sections of DNA natural base sequences may well reveal language-like sequences which, when ultimately decoded, will prove to constitute some form of advanced intelligence code powering the robotic assembly line of the genetic technique.

What is the globe out there like?

This was the massively ill-posed inverse situation that a systems style and assembly robot would face in circumstances of the genetic program in bio-evolutionary history. Given a presumption of DNA as a programmed intelligence program which could not literally "see" the globe out there, one might possibly conjecture that it need to have proceeded, at crucial stages in evolutionary history, by "smartguessing," from fragmentary evidence, what a valid bioengineering resolution to the challenge at hand may well appear like and then proceeding to mapping out by enormous parallel computing procedure statespace variations to the initial configuration beneath self imposed constraints of logic which reflect the standard assumptions with regard to statespace boundaries of the system getting simulated.

Evolutionary mutations might possibly not have been specifically random but could have proceeded below statespace operational constraints but any highly organized technique ought to bear with some noise: the typically deleterious mutations geneticists deal with in irradiated drosophila but mistake for the driving force of evolutionary progress.

Defining a statespace is largely synonymous with establishing a language for expressing solutions in predicament solving circumstances. The initial configuration and "neighborhood" rules governing the evolution of cellular automata, for instance, are synonymous with the rules of logic in human languages: the distinction between logic operations of language and operations of a cellular automaton becoming only superficial.

The states and transformations of an automaton can, for that reason, function effectively as a symbolic logic model of a given physical relational order in the identical way that language can, if and only if the rules of its operations reflect or anticipate the logic of the states and transformations of the physical relational order it encodes.

When, but, as it could take place, there is an asymmetry between the logic of a system and the logic of the language which seeks to describe it, language inevitable devolves into gibberish corresponding to teratological types of the physical relational order it encodes.

The implication of the foregoing to a Theory of Evolution is profound: the logic of DNA states and mutational transformations must somehow anticipate the idiosyncratic logic of bio-systems states and transformations. It is, in this context, necessary to point out the reality that "Artificial Life" designers mislead laymen when they talk of "seed" populations in a genetic algorithm as randomly generated. The "randomness" at initialization is inside the boundaries of a defined state or search space, and the "seeding," often, is with a bias for the regions of statespace in which optimal solutions are expected to be discovered.

DNA could have behaved specifically like the "Artificial Life" designer in evolutionary history, by implementing stochastic search algorithms for optimal bio-engineering solutions inside the boundaries of the statespace it defines with respect to the bioengineering difficulty under consideration: that is, DNA mutations may well not be random in the way biologists naively conceive.

Receiving appropriately acquainted with DNA as an intelligent robot would involve elucidating the statespace intelligence algorithms on which it runs. Nature abounds with glaring evidence of the added-ordinary "smartguessing" skills of bio-material systems: the inverse optics wizardry of the human eye-brain couple, the navigational abilities of birds and insects (DNA had no readymade "map of the planet" to work with), and the rapid and effective mutational responses of microbes to antibiotic agents.

I have this powerful gut feeling that we'd nevertheless be wallowing abjectly, beyond redemption, in the pristine natural soup had DNA no intelligent, street-smart alternatives to the naive "random mutations" of the "Neo-Darwinian synthesis."