A.B. : Artificial Biology.

John D. Brey said:

Everyone's always talking about artificial intelligence (A.I.). How come no one speaks of artificial biology (A.B)? The Bible says we already have the mind of Christ (a post-biological, and thus quasi-artificial intelligence) ----while the artificial body (post-biology, and thus quasi-artificial biology) is still in the making, is still being formed. What is it?

In a thread here a couple years ago (Sex and the Origins of Death) I pointed out that the original living organisms were all immortal. I quoted a Phd. biologist (William R. Clark) saying that if given ample resources, and no external hazards, the original living organisms could live forever. Apparently that wasn't good enough. And why would it be? Imagine living thousands of years, building quite a crib, and then suddenly crashing your ride off a cliff and dying. We gotta do something about that. So life did. It traded its immortality for sex and death.

But don't think life stupid. Far from it. In the trade-off for embodied death (through sexually transmitted senescence), life literally conceived a way to live forever and ever ---even if the planet implodes ----by evolving artificial biology to go along with artificial intelligence. That seems pretty smart if you ask me.



John

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Maybe both the body and mind are still evolving? Certainly, bonobo chimps, which we are most closely related, changed as they involved into humans (increased brain size and walked upright).

If Jesus was merely a man (born of a woman who fooled around on her husband Joseph...so, to avoid getting stoned made up the immaculate conception story), and if the bible is wrong, then the entire premise of your artificial intelligence argument is wrong.

How would a biologist (Clark) know that organisms could live forever? Is he a doctor? Is he a molecular biologist? Even they could not make the outrageous claim that organisms could live forever. To make such a claim without any scientific experiments is ridiculous.

"Traded immortality for sex and death"....only if you believe what the bible says. Is there any scientific evidence of humans living very long? Bones that show many growth rings? Apparently not. The only proof is a bible that clearly has contradictions in many places, and clearly has outrageous stories (Jonah and the whale/fish, for example), and was written a hundred years after apostles died, and quotes each apostle. Something seems "fishy" about Jonah and the bible.

Christians are stuck in an awkward predicament, with science saying one thing and the bible saying another. They use pseudo-science with arguments that are easily shot down by real scientists to promote the lies of the Christian religion. Lies that hide priests who molest little boys....lies about Christian love (belying the true nature of wars caused by Christians)...lies about torture (inquisition, conversos (torturing Jews to convert them to Christianity)....None of this is about God's love.

Mankind's impact on Global Warming is greatly accelerating it, to the point that mankind could go extinct. Fires, droughts, and hurricanes with increased strength have been ravaging the world while Christians have been telling lies about it. President George W. Bush hid the truth by getting his lawyers to rewrite the United States Environmental Report, prompting the resignation of the woman in charge of producing it. The love of oil mammon is destroying God's environment, and Christians are lying about Global Warming.

Should we allow outright lies, or speak out when we see them? Surely such lies are very harmful.

ideogenous_mover said:

Complex organisms seem to need to reproduce like they do; one's intuition seems to say that asexual reproduction would be 'too costly.' And as you can understand from the middle of Robert Sapolsky's freely available stanford lecture on sexuality, male organisms even retain nipples, which is described as a spandrel. So biology is showing a sense of economy there

Perhaps genes in an organism want the immortality, and just use organisms for a game of 'pop goes the weasel.' The environment is pretty dangerous after all, you'll want a new car now and then. And If it was truly that easy to replace every biological bit in an organism, they might put their bet more into an immortal organism.

Likely, a flying space crab, judging by the rate of carcinisation

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Organisms might be bored with eternal life? Eternal life means that one had better not reproduce or the world will soon become very crowded (hence the ban on reproduction that God placed on Adam and Eve). I suspect that the forbidden fruit of knowledge was carnal knowledge (the knowledge of how to have kids). Eden would have been over-crowded, so God banned such behavior.

Clara Tea said:

Organisms might be bored with eternal life? Eternal life means that one had better not reproduce or the world will soon become very crowded (hence the ban on reproduction that God placed on Adam and Eve). I suspect that the forbidden fruit of knowledge was carnal knowledge (the knowledge of how to have kids). Eden would have been over-crowded, so God banned such behavior.

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There wouldn't be a drive for an immortal being to have kids. Reproduction requires an instinct from biology, who determines that 1000 organisms are better than five. Five immortal organisms are fragile.

John D. Brey said:

Everyone's always talking about artificial intelligence (A.I.). How come no one speaks of artificial biology (A.B)? The Bible says we already have the mind of Christ (a post-biological, and thus quasi-artificial intelligence) ----while the artificial body (post-biology, and thus quasi-artificial biology) is still in the making, is still being formed. What is it?

In a thread here a couple years ago (Sex and the Origins of Death) I pointed out that the original living organisms were all immortal. I quoted a Phd. biologist (William R. Clark) saying that if given ample resources, and no external hazards, the original living organisms could live forever. Apparently that wasn't good enough. And why would it be? Imagine living thousands of years, building quite a crib, and then suddenly crashing your ride off a cliff and dying. We gotta do something about that. So life did. It traded its immortality for sex and death.

But don't think life stupid. Far from it. In the trade-off for embodied death (through sexually transmitted senescence), life literally conceived a way to live forever and ever ---even if the planet implodes ----by evolving artificial biology to go along with artificial intelligence. That seems pretty smart if you ask me.



John

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I think we can look to Dorian Grey to answer this topic.

John D. Brey said:

Everyone's always talking about artificial intelligence (A.I.). How come no one speaks of artificial biology (A.B)? The Bible says we already have the mind of Christ (a post-biological, and thus quasi-artificial intelligence) ----while the artificial body (post-biology, and thus quasi-artificial biology) is still in the making, is still being formed. What is it?

In a thread here a couple years ago (Sex and the Origins of Death) I pointed out that the original living organisms were all immortal. I quoted a Phd. biologist (William R. Clark) saying that if given ample resources, and no external hazards, the original living organisms could live forever. Apparently that wasn't good enough. And why would it be? Imagine living thousands of years, building quite a crib, and then suddenly crashing your ride off a cliff and dying. We gotta do something about that. So life did. It traded its immortality for sex and death.

But don't think life stupid. Far from it. In the trade-off for embodied death (through sexually transmitted senescence), life literally conceived a way to live forever and ever ---even if the planet implodes ----by evolving artificial biology to go along with artificial intelligence. That seems pretty smart if you ask me.



John

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How much longer are you going to go on like this? How long until you establish a relationship with the strong man from below who realizes that the fire of truth is to be trusted more than your eyes?

John D. Brey said:

Everyone's always talking about artificial intelligence (A.I.). How come no one speaks of artificial biology (A.B)? The Bible says we already have the mind of Christ (a post-biological, and thus quasi-artificial intelligence) ----while the artificial body (post-biology, and thus quasi-artificial biology) is still in the making, is still being formed. What is it?

In a thread here a couple years ago (Sex and the Origins of Death) I pointed out that the original living organisms were all immortal. I quoted a Phd. biologist (William R. Clark) saying that if given ample resources, and no external hazards, the original living organisms could live forever. Apparently that wasn't good enough. And why would it be? Imagine living thousands of years, building quite a crib, and then suddenly crashing your ride off a cliff and dying. We gotta do something about that. So life did. It traded its immortality for sex and death.

But don't think life stupid. Far from it. In the trade-off for embodied death (through sexually transmitted senescence), life literally conceived a way to live forever and ever ---even if the planet implodes ----by evolving artificial biology to go along with artificial intelligence. That seems pretty smart if you ask me.



John

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There is no such thing as an imortal organism.

Long lived sure, but not immortal.

PruePhillip said:

Death is an integral part of biology - the whole point of which is to constantly replace
the organism with newer copies which can be sorted and tested.

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Sorted and tested for what? By whom? And to what end:

There's no point for
biology to create creatures who live forever - if we lived forever you would soon be
outsmarted and out-competed by newer, mortal variants of your own species who
would be gobbling up your resources.

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This assumes we all have to share the same pie. Which is true so long as the second law of thermodynamics isn't amended. And since living forever is the first amendment to the second law, i.e., the freedom to speak of such things forever, I wouldn't worry too much about the baker who's making the pie under the auspices of a second law which is in the process of being amended.



John

Samantha Rinne said:

Let's have real things. Okay?

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How do you define "real"?

The purpose of religion is not to be anti-technology.

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. . . That's Deuteronomy, uh, um . . . sorry the verse evades my memory. Could you refresh it?

It's to bring people together peacefully, and put the hard brakes on blowing ourselves up or trying unethical things that devalue humanity. Cloning, harvesting parts, turning ourselves into zombies or robots, none of these things improve human life. I also think we're supposed to naturally evolve into energy beings. Trapping us inside physical things is a no.

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Rinne verse 12:24?



John

RestlessSoul said:

We are creatures, I believe, of mind, body and spirit. Over identifying with, or holding too tightly to, either mind or body, or both, is surely to the detriment of the spirit.

Most religious and spiritual traditions teach the transience of material things, and the importance of letting go; not clinging more tightly to them.

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Amen.

On a minor note, I would go with Karl Popper in equating "mind" with world 3, i.e., spirit. The soul, again with Popper, I would equate with conscious perception. Which is the staging area for the human kind of mental gymnastics. . . Popper was kind of the Simone Biles of his day when it comes to world 3 mental gymnastics.



John

ideogenous_mover said:

. . . as you can understand from the middle of Robert Sapolsky's freely available stanford lecture on sexuality, male organisms even retain nipples, which is described as a spandrel. So biology is showing a sense of economy there

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As I argued elsewhere, the nipples on a male are not just breadcrumbs left by the gods for intuitive souls seeking the truth; they're a whole dammed loaf of matzah. . . As is the fact that the female nipples are found on permanently ithyphallic breasts (erect breasts) when in all other mammals ithyphallic breasts only occur when the female is pregnant?

The unsoiled archetype of the original, pure, human female, in this case Mary, was born already pregnant such that at puberty, when that pre-phallic-sex pregnancy was announced, i.e., the Annunciation, her breasts became erect with the holy place of her body still secured, still sanctified, by the intact veil of her bodily temple, the intact hymenal veil of virginity.

The virgin Mary had enlarged, erect, breasts, which in all other mammals implies that a birth is imminent. And one was. It's just that it was the archetype for what should have occurred in the first place if the first human hadn't fooled around and fallen in love with sexual congress thereafter causing the race to start raising Cain from the get-go.



John

ideogenous_mover said:

Perhaps genes in an organism want the immortality, and just use organisms for a game of 'pop goes the weasel.' The environment is pretty dangerous after all, you'll want a new car now and then. And If it was truly that easy to replace every biological bit in an organism, they might put their bet more into an immortal organism.

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John

Twilight Hue said:

There is no such thing as an imortal organism.

Long lived sure, but not immortal.

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In science, "immortal" just means that death isn't a foregone conclusion wired into the genes. The original living organisms were all immortal. They could have lived forever if not for unfortunate forces and events outside of the control of their genes.




John

Clara Tea said:

Maybe both the body and mind are still evolving?

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Thinkers like Karl Popper, biologist William R. Clark, and Daniel Dennett, imply that it appears that "mind" has taken over from biology so far meaningful evolution is concerned. And mind does what took biology millions of years, in years, months, or days.

The point of this thread is to suggest that "mind" (which in the sense that it transcends biology can be thought of as "artificial") is in the process of evolving "body" so that like it, the mind, so too the body, will be freed from the mindless contingencies of biology, nature, and death, even if that virtue comes at the cost of being called "artificial": Artificial Biology.




John

Clara Tea said:

If Jesus was merely a man (born of a woman who fooled around on her husband Joseph...so, to avoid getting stoned made up the immaculate conception story), and if the bible is wrong, then the entire premise of your artificial intelligence argument is wrong.

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Part and parcel of your statement is the fact that orthodox Judaism thinks they're demonizing Christian thought, to include the virgin birth, by pointing out, rightly of course, that it's pagan to the core. Pagan religions have been toying with the idea of a virgin born deity since the beginning of time precisely because of the science being offered up in this thread.

Originally organisms are immortal. They trade that immortality for death through sexual congress (Genesis chapter 2). But they do so for a purpose. Knowing that hidden in every act of sexual congress is the possibility of a latter-day immortal bursting onto the scene (the Annunciation) as a bi-ped mammalian immortal armed with the tool to wipe death right out of the human genome.

Jesus of Nazareth provided the means and the know-how for mankind to wipe death right out of the human genome. And that's what Popper's world 3, the mind which transcends its frail biological frame, is in the process of doing. That mind is moving my fingers as I type in order to let anyone with an ear here what's coming.



John

Clara Tea said:

How would a biologist (Clark) know that organisms could live forever? Is he a doctor? Is he a molecular biologist? Even they could not make the outrageous claim that organisms could live forever. To make such a claim without any scientific experiments is ridiculous.

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I don't know if there's a biology professor in the USA who is unaware that the original living organisms were, all of them, immortal (so far as their genes are concerned). I've quoted professor Clark, and Lynn Margulis, as merely typical of what any good biology professor is fully aware of. I don't think there's even an argument that the original organisms weren't biologically immortal since senescence (programmed aging and death) is known to have come about long after life began, and even today, organisms like hydra are thought to be biologically immortal.



John

Clara Tea said:

"Traded immortality for sex and death"....only if you believe what the bible says. Is there any scientific evidence of humans living very long?

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The question whether the Bible's mythology is merely an ancient, simplistic, means of recording profound scientific facts, versus being literally true, is another thread. For the purpose of this thread, at least so far, it doesn't matter if the Bible is literal or not, but merely that for whatever reason, and no matter how it does it, it records profoundly accurate scientific truths.

For what it's worth, even if we take the Bible literally, it doesn't tell us how long Adam and Eve lived in the garden of immortality before they traded it for death. It could have been fifty years for all we know. And since after that they were expelled from the garden, and made to senescence and die, there wouldn't necessarily have been any humans living for thousands and thousands of years.



John

Clara Tea said:

Christians are stuck in an awkward predicament, with science saying one thing and the bible saying another. They use pseudo-science with arguments that are easily shot down by real scientists to promote the lies of the Christian religion. Lies that hide priests who molest little boys....lies about Christian love (belying the true nature of wars caused by Christians)...lies about torture (inquisition, conversos (torturing Jews to convert them to Christianity)....None of this is about God's love.

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On this I would say read Professor Joseph Henrich's, The WEIRDEST People in the World. He's Harvard University's current biology professor. And he puts the lie to the orthodox opinion about Christianity's role in the evolution of the modern world and modern Western-man.



John

Clara Tea said:

Should we allow outright lies, or speak out when we see them? Surely such lies are very harmful.

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We should speak out about them. And since we're all in the same boat, we should get together, you, me, everybody, and establish a unified criteria for determining what is fiction, and what is true? What is "real," and what is only real within a skewed prism or epistemological context?



John

Clara Tea said:

Mankind's impact on Global Warming is greatly accelerating it, to the point that mankind could go extinct. Fires, droughts, and hurricanes with increased strength have been ravaging the world while Christians have been telling lies about it. President George W. Bush hid the truth by getting his lawyers to rewrite the United States Environmental Report, prompting the resignation of the woman in charge of producing it. The love of oil mammon is destroying God's environment, and Christians are lying about Global Warming.

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In keeping with the theme that the Bible knows everything before it becomes scientific knowledge, we read in Revelation 16:8, which is a prophesy concerning the approaching end of the age, i.e., us:


The Christian idea isn't necessarily that global warming won't occur, or isn't occurring, so much as it's that those who claim it's being caused by men are blasphemers who are themselves bringing it on. Those who reject divine authority over evolution (and the healthy functioning of the biosphere), and claim it's "natural" are said, in the Bible, to be the blasphemers who are the true source of global warming even as they blame others, rather than themselves, for what their blasphemy has wrought upon the earth.

If you put a thermometer in the right hand or on the forehead of a blasphemer reading the preceding paragraph his temperature will go up between six and sixty-six degrees. This process is so profound that it's raising the temperature of the biosphere little by little by blasphemous little until it becomes dangerous to the lot of us. The Bible's idea seems to be that we shouldn't blame global warming on dinosaur urine or feces so much as we should blame it on every word that comes out of the mouth of a blasphemer. The Bible's implying the blasphemer's mouth is the hole out of which fossilized intellect is fueling global warming: rotten intellect is the fossil-fuel that's powering global warming. The blaspheming agnostic's hot air is the source for the rise in the temperature of the biosphere.



John

John D. Brey said:

Sorted and tested for what? By whom? And to what end:

Death did not appear simultaneously with life. This is one of the most important and profound statements in all of biology. At the very least it deserves repetition: Death is not inextricably intertwined with the definition of life.​

Professor of Biology, William R. Clark.​

This assumes we all have to share the same pie. Which is true so long as the second law of thermodynamics isn't amended. And since living forever is the first amendment to the second law, i.e., the freedom to speak of such things forever, I wouldn't worry too much about the baker who's making the pie under the auspices of a second law which is in the process of being amended.



John

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Definitions of life play no part in this - everyone has such a definition.
However one such definition incorporates the ability of the organism
to EVOLVE.
The Lenski experiment with 10,000 generations of e.Coli is interesting,
and if you could do the same thing with flowers or humans you would
see the same thing. And placed in a stress environment evolution
speeds up enormously. So... every organism on earth has this inbuilt
ability/need to evolve - its built into us.

nb not sure how the second law of thermodynamics is supposed to
come into this definition. Why not all the laws of thermodynamics
and all the laws of motion?