Month: September 2022

MECHANICAL LIFE. "Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner argued that Turing machines have much in common with cells and living organisms; that cells and living organisms are, in fact, the best examples of Turing’s and von Neumann’s machines." https://lnkd.in/eeiUHXC View in LinkedIn

"A TURING MACHINE is a hypothetical machine thought of by the mathematician Alan Turing in 1936. Despite its simplicity, the machine can simulate ANY computer algorithm, no matter how complicated it is! It consists of an infinitely-long tape which acts like the memory in a typical computer, or any other form of data storage." https://lnkd.in/enMamia View in LinkedIn

CODE SCRIPT. "Physicist Erwin Schrödinger confused the program and the constructor in his 1944 book What is Life?, in which he saw chromosomes as “architect's plan and builder's craft in one”. This is wrong. The code script contains only a description of the executive function, not the function itself.” [Brenner, 2012]." https://lnkd.in/eixDbva View in LinkedIn

EMERGENCE IS NOT REDUCTIONISTIC. "In our opinion, such a mechanistic, bottom-up doctrine does not explain the true living nature of organisms as it ignores the top-down, context-dependent and agent-based aspects of living nature." https://lnkd.in/eeiUHXC View in LinkedIn

LINGUISTIC FLAW. "The crucial difference between a Turing and von Neumann machine and biological cell-based organisms is that the formal language needed to operate machines is not compatible with the natural languages of genetic codes and signalling networks." https://lnkd.in/eeiUHXC View in LinkedIn

GENES ARE NOT EVERYTHING. "Machines, no matter how complex and sophisticated, are inevitably the result of machine-building competences of human engineers, but an organism is not the mere result of a blueprint represented by its genes." Three key rebuttals follow. https://lnkd.in/eeiUHXC View in LinkedIn

REBUTTAL #1: "Context-dependent epigenetic markers control the activity of genes. These markers are not inscribed in the genome but are the result of internal processes, environmental factors and developmental history." https://lnkd.in/eeiUHXC View in LinkedIn

REBUTTAL #2: "Agency on its own behalf and interpretation of meaning—context-decoding—are obviously, and essentially, already present at the level of single proteins or RNA molecules." https://lnkd.in/eeiUHXC View in LinkedIn

REBUTTAL #3: "We do not agree with Brenner's criticism of Erwin Schrödinger for his statement that "chromosomes act as an “architect’s plan and builder’s craft in one”. The claim that chromosomes just represent a code script is wrong as chromosomes contain DNA sequences as well as proteins and RNA molecules. In fact, the amounts of proteins and RNAs are much higher than in DNA." https://lnkd.in/eeiUHXC View in LinkedIn

Attenborough urges UK to use Brexit to improve wildlife protections View in LinkedIn