[ExI] Anti-transhumanist crap on Kuro5hin and related.

[scerir]

Giovanni ha scritto:
I think it is kind of silly to try to "explain"
evolution in terms of "chance". Chance is a code-word
for our ignorance. Saying that evolution is driven
by probabilistic events is not really an explanation
of anything. It just shows we don't understand what
really goes on and we recur to statistical arguments
as the best possible way to model what we don't
fully understand.

# 

This reminds me of J. Steinbeck.
"Non-teleological thinking concerns itself 
primarily not with what should be, or could be, 
or might be, but rather with what actually 'is' 
.... attempting at most to answer the already 
sufficiently difficult questions 'what' or 'how', 
instead of 'why' ... In the non-teleological sense 
there can be no 'answer'. There can be only pictures 
which become larger and more significant as one's 
horizon increases."

Aristotle wrote about 'hylomorphism' (from hule = stuff, 
and morphe = form, information). I do not know if Aristotle 
thought that forms-informations were the 'evolutive' 
part of the stuff. But it seems possible to me.

It is interesting to point out that a sort of 'hylomorphism'
is, more or less, evident in fragments of modern science. 

In example, there is a difference between physical 'states' 
and the (limited) information carried by these 'states'.
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0212084
http://www.quantum.univie.ac.at/zeilinger/foundations.pdf
http://www.quantum.univie.ac.at/links/newscientist/bit.html

See also Wheeler's 'participatory universe'. 
'All things physical are information - theoretic in origin 
and this is a participatory universe...  Observer participancy 
gives rise to information; and information gives rise to physics.'
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/321/wheeler.pdf
http://forizslaszlo.com/tudomany/wheeler_law_without_law.pdf

Not to mention here Jurgen
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/
and Max
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646

Back to the bio? See this interesting entry
http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=287
about deoxyribononapproximability :-) 

s.

"The only laws of matter are those
which our minds must fabricate,
and the only laws of mind
are fabricated for it by matter."
-James Clerk Maxwell