[ Follow Ups ]
Posted by Ramellini on November 30, 1999 at 11:10:40:
In Reply to: Posting revised preprint "...life on planet Earth" posted by Dov on November 24, 1999 at 11:23:13:
I've posted this message in the discussion on genetic program; I think it is interesting to you.
Before the idea that cells "contain"
a program of instructions was transferred from information theory to biology,
we must remember that it had arrived to information theory from psychology, i.e
from the idea that men and women are able to process instructions.
So, the genetic program is a biological analogue of psychological mind. From
this point of view, other ideas spring out as an unavoidable outcome of the
preliminary statement: the "thinking molecules" (see Henis' preprint
on HBG), the methabolism as a computational activity, the presence of a
cellular mind; and inevitably such a premise ends up by being extended to the
whole universe, thought as an immense computer or mind. It is perhaps uncorrect
to say that the idea of thinking matter is absent in Western thought, or that
"within present human culture, the idea of "thinking" molecule
is difficult to accept" (Sergei, message 229 on old HBG forum); it is a
part of a Weltanschauung dating back, for instance, to Diderot, who spoke, in
his "La reve de d'Alembert", about a general sensibility of matter
and universe, the only way to admit human sensibility without appealing to
immaterial entities; obviously, the presence of such an idea doesn't imply its
truthfulness; I think for instance that we know too little our mind to attempt
comparisons between mind and matter.
The alternative position is that there are only particles and their casual
movements, without any kind of abstract, immaterial mind, neither in cells, nor
in our brain; there are neither programs to perform nor instructions to be
followed. This is the end of Descartes' division of reality between a 'res
extensa' and a 'res cogitans'; as soon as the 'chose qui pense' was eliminated
as a troublesome residue of spiritualism, no programs were conceivable in a
totally mechanistical universe.