Is life a form of computation?
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
Is life a form of computation?
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Re: Is life a form of computation?
#2ha this is why it was read
Re: Is life a form of computation?
#3Of course. It's a computer designed to figure out the question of life, the universe and everything to which the answer is 42.
Re: Is life a form of computation?
#4Of course. It's a computer designed to figure out the question of life, the universe and everything to which the answer is 42.
And the question is "what do you get if you multiply six by nine?"
Re: Is life a form of computation?
#5Throw this random question in, does DNA spell out sentience
Could you pull out the specific list of ATCG and make a brain
Re: Is life a form of computation?
#6Re: Is life a form of computation?
#7From a neural networks professor:
https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/ag-ki/rojas_home/documents...
"However, we should be careful with the metaphors and paradigms commonly introduced when dealing with the nervous system. It seems to be a constant in the history of science that the brain has always been compared to the most complicated contemporary artifact produced by human industry [297]. In ancient times the brain was compared to a pneumatic machine, in the Renaissance to a clockwork, and at the end of the last century to the telephone network. There are some today who consider computers the paradigm par excellence of a nervous system. It is rather paradoxical that when John von Neumann wrote his classical description of future universal computers, he tried to choose terms that would describe computers in terms of brains, not brains in terms of computers."
I have no idea what the submitted MIT article is trying to say. Does the MIT article try to make the point that neural networks can be used for computation given ridiculous amounts of memory? They can, but that still does not explain real intelligence. Otherwise, the article makes the same mistakes as pointed out in the above quote.
Re: Is life a form of computation?
#8[deleted]
Re: Is life a form of computation?
#9I don't see the point of asking this question. Like, sure, all physical systems follow certain rules, so any such process will develop in a way that it look like a computation of an algorithm. Also, evolution itself is constantly optimizing organisms to best adapt to their environment, just like a computation.
So asking if life is a computation seems mostly like a semantic musing. Define "life" and define "computation", then see if they're the same.
Re: Is life a form of computation?
#10This feels like the kind of popsci that's written for people who already agree with the author - there's nothing resembling an argument, or even a definition of "computation." There are nods to Church-Turing, but the leap from "every effectively calculable function is computable" to "life is a computation" is larger than anything you could fit in a book.