The Universe: Machine or Organism?

[Polymirize]

look at all the little cogs putting on airs...

First, I want to take issue with your claim that the brain is a complex variant of a computer. This is patently false. Computers were built to model some of the brain's functions, but its a logical error to reverse this causation and assume that what a brain is, is essentially just a more complex model.

I want to know why you feel that identifying with an organism has a more engaging aspect to it than identifying with a machine? Aren't all the part of a machine as equally engaged as the parts of an organism? In fact, with a machine, assuming its well engineered, one could say that all the parts are essential. Everything involved plays its own vital role. With organisms, well, let's just say I still have an appendix, and its not doing anything for me.

I'd think that regardless of how you structure these possibilities, its impossible to show that one is actually better or more fruitful then the other. Obviously they're both just a mask one can wear to hide from the world and for this reason alone I think it's a silly question.

[orange floyd]

Thanks for the reply, Hamlet.

Of course, living day-to-day in a state of complete ego-loss is hardly practical, if it's even possible (though perhaps Buddha and Jesus may have attained such states). What I'm talking about isn't casting off the masks that are our egos (sense of self) completely and permanently, but rather being consciously aware that it is only a mask.

Clear me up on this: I hear many people talk about the high states of consciousnesss etc. reached by Guatama and Jesus. The former i can completely understand, but what about Jesus (from a non-Christian perspective) would put him on the same level as the Buddha? Buddha pretty much took Hinduism and made it exportable for anyone to be able to in time reach enlightenment, or get close, and has a system that has held up throughout the centuries and doesnt focus on "morals" and other ever-changing things: he was able to look through them. I realize I'm getting a little side tracked and going on more about arguing pro-Buddhism, but just enlighten me what qualifies Jesus at being at a higher state of consciousness (or however you would describe it).

[afghooey]

Polymirize --

Thanks for your reply.

I must admit, I'm neither a computer engineer, nor a neuroscientist, but I do also understand that a computer and a brain aren't the same in all aspects. Maybe it was a bit naive of me to jump to the conclusion that a brain and a computer essentially function the same way... I'm just piecing together what I know from college psychology and my (admittedly limited) knowledge of computers. The analogy still makes sense to me, though maybe you could explain a little further why it doesn't to you? If you're willing to humor my sense of curiosity.

I want to know why you feel that identifying with an organism has a more engaging aspect to it than identifying with a machine? Aren't all the part of a machine as equally engaged as the parts of an organism? In fact, with a machine, assuming its well engineered, one could say that all the parts are essential. Everything involved plays its own vital role. With organisms, well, let's just say I still have an appendix, and its not doing anything for me.

Really, whether you think of yourself or the universe as a machine or an organism is completely arbitrary, and two different ways of looking at the same thing (the universe as a whole). But often (at least from my own experience) when one thinks of a machine, they think of something cold, lifeless, and purely mechanical. When one thinks of an organism, they think of something alive and conscious. Whether an organism is 'better' than a machine is also completely subject to opinion, but IMO it has little to do with how efficiently they work in relation to the essentiality of parts. Flaws (such as your useless appendix) are necessary products of an evolution which machines have not had to go through (at least not independently).

As I said in my second post, it's a matter of attitudes and values, and so (just like with beliefs) it is impossible to prove that one is better than the other. To me, personally, thinking of the universe as something as alive and conscious as I am, rather than thinking of myself as a soul trapped in a mechanical body, is more appealing.

[afghooey]

Clear me up on this: I hear many people talk about the high states of consciousnesss etc. reached by Guatama and Jesus. The former i can completely understand, but what about Jesus (from a non-Christian perspective) would put him on the same level as the Buddha? Buddha pretty much took Hinduism and made it exportable for anyone to be able to in time reach enlightenment, or get close, and has a system that has held up throughout the centuries and doesnt focus on "morals" and other ever-changing things: he was able to look through them. I realize I'm getting a little side tracked and going on more about arguing pro-Buddhism, but just enlighten me what qualifies Jesus at being at a higher state of consciousness (or however you would describe it).

I honestly don't know. :stoned: I didn't know Jesus personally. But from descriptions of him that I've heard and read, it seems to me that he might have been a Buddha himself (a being who has transcended greed, hate, ignorance and suffering... or achieved nirvana). Just speculation, really.. I'm not a theologist either.

[Polymirize]

To me, personally, thinking of the universe as something as alive and conscious as I am, rather than thinking of myself as a soul trapped in a mechanical body, is more appealing.

In answer to your first question, computers are built to model certain human brain functions, most notably an ordering of logic. But to take this point and jump from it to say that brains are essentially biological computers reduces the brain to our current understanding of it. It ignores the possibility that there are processes within our minds that are invisible to us.

Computers are impressive, sure. But before they existed would you have said that the brain was a biological abacus? Until artificial intelligence and cognition arive on the scene for computer science, there are rather obvious gaps in the analogy.

By the same analogy however, I would say that all organisms are also machines, and so the dividing characteristic would have to be biological or mechanistic traits. Rather than organism vs machine. Would that work?

[afghooey]

Hmm, I get what you're saying. I guess that is quite true that we still have much to learn about the brain. I can see where my analogy was flawed, and I thank you for pointing that out. But as you break things down more and more to study them, you can see that everything still fundamentally consists of bits of information. For example:

The DNA in human beings contains about three billion nucleic acids. However,much of the information coded in this sequence is redundant or is inactive. So the total amount of useful information in our genes is probably something like a hundred million bits. One bit of information is the answer to a yes no question. By contrast, a paperback novel might contain two million bits of information. So a human is equivalent to 50 Mills and Boon romances. The University Library contains about five million books or about ten trillion bits. So the amount of information handed down in books is a hundred thousand times as much as in DNA.

(Stephen Hawking: Life in the Universe, http://www.brembs.net/SWH.html)

Stephen goes on to argue that our evolution has shifted from a darwinian 'natural selection' phase to an 'external transmission' phase -- that in effect, the knowledge that we pass on through 'inanimate' books and computers are indeed a part of our evolution. After all, we are not our genes, a fact to which scientists agree.

Take viruses, for example. It is often argued whether they are living entities due to the fact that they don't meet some of the previously mentioned 'prerequisites' for life. They have no metabolism, they don't 'grow' in the same way that cells do. Yet, they do have a blueprint (RNA) and they do behave in a way that allows them to propagate themselves. Stephen Hawkings also points out that just because they must use the metabolism of a host cell to reproduce doesn't mean they are not alive. Just like most things that we do consider alive, they must rely on other life to survive.

So, I would argue that the 'biological traits' of life are incidental, and not truly dividing. Though such traits (like the presence of carbon molecules which conveniently group together to form strands of molecules to form RNA and DNA) are a common factor in all 'life as we know it', that doesn't mean that they are necessarily required for life to exist, and they're most certainly not what causes life. In fact, that's one thing that scientists haven't been able to determine, and something that they still struggle over -- if RNA and DNA are just blueprints, what is the driving force of life? How does this great machine create and run itself, with no outside intelligent force?

But as I said, if we remove this outdated context of machine and creator from the universe, and instead view the universe as the living creator of itself, this dilemma is resolved.