http://www.davidbrin.com/givingplague.html A very nice story of Brin based on the notion of a process of infectious agents "watering down" over time.
Thank you! I was just going to ask for that story!
HIV evolving 'into milder form'
31–40 of 71 posts
Re: HIV evolving 'into milder form'
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an interesting thought. It's like they posses "artificial intelligence", i.e. they behave like the famous paper clip maximizer.
Obviously viruses are not intelligent and they don't "want" to reproduce. However, they do reproduce, just like pretty much every other form of life. The question of why life does that is closely related to the question of what life is and how it came to exist. Those are deep questions and we don't really have a clue as to the answer right now. There's certainly nothing in the fundamental physical laws of the univers…
Fundamentally life is just patterns of information and their associated support structures capable of reproducing and adapting to their environment. There really is no answer to the question of "why" life reproduces because life that does not reproduce ceases to be life. The reproduction component is inherent in its definition.
As to why our universe is one which supports life, nobody really knows. Some invoke the anthropic principle, but that is more of a philosophical answer than a scientific one.
Re: HIV evolving 'into milder form'
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
90-95% of adults had it at some point . Most people develop immunity to it and so it doesn't survive in them. I'd say the most successful virus in humans would be the common cold, given how frequently we seem to get it, although it's more of a massive family of virii.
Virii is a nonsense word. Unless, Virius was your original reference word.
I'm afraid that battle is long lost now :(.
Re: HIV evolving 'into milder form'
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an interesting thought. It's like they posses "artificial intelligence", i.e. they behave like the famous paper clip maximizer.
No, that's just evolution - plain, simple and extremely dumb. Viruses don't really "want" anything, they are just biomolecular machines that run around replicating themselves and screwing things up; some manage to copy themselves, some don't - and this way, generation after generation, you're left with those viruses that are good at copying themselves in the environment they're in. Evolution is a statistical phenomen…
Except that, depending on your definition of "intelligence", evolution even as a statistical process fits most to all of the criteria necessary to be intelligent. Basically any definition of intelligence that fits the stuff you see in the movies will also tend to fit evolution. "Has goals, biases set of possible futures toward completing those goals, demonstrates creativity", and so on. It's just that evolution, as an intelligent entity, is utterly, unbelievably alien - psychologically, physically, and 'physiologically'. Which I guess makes sense, right? Aliens aren't going to have rubber foreheads and five fingers; they're going to be utterly unbelievably alien.
Re: HIV evolving 'into milder form'
#35Good guy HIV.
Re: HIV evolving 'into milder form'
#36As is so often the case, William Gibson came pretty close to predicting this:
Re: HIV evolving 'into milder form'
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's just evolution - plain, simple and extremely dumb. Viruses don't really "want" anything, they are just biomolecular machines that run around replicating themselves and screwing things up; some manage to copy themselves, some don't - and this way, generation after generation, you're left with those viruses that are good at copying themselves in the environment they're in. Evolution is a statistical phenomen…
Except that, depending on your definition of "intelligence", evolution even as a statistical process fits most to all of the criteria necessary to be intelligent. Basically any definition of intelligence that fits the stuff you see in the movies will also tend to fit evolution. "Has goals, biases set of possible futures toward completing those goals, demonstrates creativity", and so on. It's just that evolution, as a…
True, but it's a kind of a "null garbage collector" case. It's the dumbest type of intelligence, a random one. But it did also created intelligences less dumb than itself, if you view the evolutionary process as separate from the workings of human mind.
Re: HIV evolving 'into milder form'
#38Surely this process means that HIV is just as capable of evolving into something even more lethal over time, given the right environment? Given the relatively closed environment of a country like North Korea (for example) where diversity is restricted, its evolutionary path may take a different route than that observed by the University of Oxford research team?
Why do people downvote questions?
Re: HIV evolving 'into milder form'
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's just evolution - plain, simple and extremely dumb. Viruses don't really "want" anything, they are just biomolecular machines that run around replicating themselves and screwing things up; some manage to copy themselves, some don't - and this way, generation after generation, you're left with those viruses that are good at copying themselves in the environment they're in. Evolution is a statistical phenomen…
Except that, depending on your definition of "intelligence", evolution even as a statistical process fits most to all of the criteria necessary to be intelligent. Basically any definition of intelligence that fits the stuff you see in the movies will also tend to fit evolution. "Has goals, biases set of possible futures toward completing those goals, demonstrates creativity", and so on. It's just that evolution, as a…
This splits into two points:
1. You're right, our intelligence is the same thing. Intellect is a statistical creation that makes us good at surviving.
2. But usually, when people talk about our intelligence and our having goals, they aren't talking about the fact that we statistically exhibit tendencies towards self-preservation (which is what we're talking about viruses doing). It's that we literally have conceptual goals, which can be written down ahead of time and talked about.
aka you won't find a virus with a to-do list. Conflating that intelligence with viral 'intelligence' is kinda disingeuous.
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That said, I do agree that we might/will find alien life that looks nothing like what we expect and has 'intelligence', for some reasonable (non-virus) definition.
I would not be inordinately surprised if we managed to find this in the motion of waves in the ocean, or in the swirling gases of the sun, or the gravitational interactions of the asteroid belt, or in tremors in the earth, or in hive-minds of billions of ants. And I definitely reject dualism and fully expect that a human brain simulated in a computer would be as intelligent as we are.
I'm not sure what the criteria for an 'intelligence medium' is, but it seems to require sufficiently high entropy to allow for complex patterns to form, but not too high - there has to be enough order and especially a not-too-high temperature such that self-contained systems can form and replicate without being blurred back into the whole system.
Re: HIV evolving 'into milder form'
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an interesting thought. It's like they posses "artificial intelligence", i.e. they behave like the famous paper clip maximizer.
No, that's just evolution - plain, simple and extremely dumb. Viruses don't really "want" anything, they are just biomolecular machines that run around replicating themselves and screwing things up; some manage to copy themselves, some don't - and this way, generation after generation, you're left with those viruses that are good at copying themselves in the environment they're in. Evolution is a statistical phenomen…
In other settings, a simple approximation of what Evolution does will balance your portfolio and find Nash Equilibriums for zero sum games much more quickly than linear programming (query: multiplicative update evolution).
Having to wait for things to die can be restrictive (but genomes are declarative, what does that buy?). Roughly, with what amounts to the assumption that Lamarckian evolution is more or less not true, you can characterize evolution's learning power as almost as good as PAC (query: statistical query learning evolution).
See alsos:
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/601.htm...
http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.4037: Natural selection. V. How to read the fundamental equations of evolutionary change in terms of information theory