Month: September 2022

INSCRUTABLE. “Our minds contain processes that enable us to solve problems we consider difficult. Intelligence is our name for whichever of those processes we don't yet understand.” https://lnkd.in/dYTNHMv View in LinkedIn

HYBRID MINDS. “The evolutionary vestiges of animals that still remain inside our brains. We use machinery evolved from fish, amphibia, reptiles, and earlier mammals.” https://lnkd.in/dQzHT87 View in LinkedIn

DUMB UNITS. “This book assumes that any brain, machine, or other thing that has a mind must be composed of smaller things that cannot think at all.” https://lnkd.in/dAkkAGX View in LinkedIn

A BINARY COMPUTER VIRUS "is a virus that carries one part of a double payload. Two strains of the virus exist, A and B. Both strains are innocuous in isolation but when they meet, the payloads combine to produce a malicious function.” https://books.google.com/books?id=_VLmBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=computer+virus+metabolism&source=bl&ots=VZ5Xit6TPg&sig=2EBk5kG-yFSqUID0C-MnUht1dPc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi51qLC35fLAhUBcj4KHQW-B9AQ6AEIDDAB View in LinkedIn

WHERE DOES LIFE STOP? A simple living cell is made of organelles and biological molecules. Is the organelle alive? Is a biomolecule alive? Is a ribosome or a nucleus alive? How far down can you divide? View in LinkedIn

THE GREY ZONE. "A single-celled bacterium is alive, but if you separate the macromolecules that combined to create the bacterium, these units are not alive. Based on our knowledge of macromolecules, we would not have been able to predict that they could combine to form a living organism, nor could we have predicted all of the characteristics of the resulting bacterium." http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/biological-complexity-and-integrative-levels-of-organization-468 View in LinkedIn

ABUNDANT CAPACITY. “The scientists estimated that there is enough data stored in the DNA molecules of every life-form alive today to occupy the processing capacity of a billion trillion of the most powerful supercomputers.” https://lnkd.in/dKU5Dr8 View in LinkedIn

LOTS OF STORAGE. “The researchers totted up the number of organisms in the world, from the tiniest virus to the biggest whale, multiplied this by the total number of their cells containing at least once DNA molecule and converted this figure into an estimated weight – about 50bn tonnes of genetic material.” https://lnkd.in/dKU5Dr8 View in LinkedIn

TWISTED LOGIC. “The image that took shape in the back of my mind was that DNA was a kind of seed, and seeds, I also thought falsely, are of course alive. But no, seeds are not fully alive either. They are not active and, until they germinate, they don’t change or develop.” https://lnkd.in/dnze6ce View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE highlights a deeply enlightened and timely paper by John Dupré and Maureen A. O’Malley called ‘Life at the Intersection of Lineage and Metabolism’. It discusses the unconventional idea of living ecosystems and chemicals as a continuum of structured collaborative entities. This is sure to offend some luddite biologists. View in LinkedIn