"Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:
>
> Responding to my comments about the difficulty of not viewing advanced
> SysOps as competitors or "parents", Brian D Williams wrote:
>
> > How about "inherent order" or "inherent emerging order".
>
> I don't like the idea of "emergent" because it suggests a
> lack of "intelligence". Everything we see in Nature is
> "emergent" and it is rather ruthless with regard to what
> information it keeps (that which is optimized for survival
> in a very local environment) and which it destroys
> (that which is suboptimal for the local environment).
Is this really true, though? From the stuff I've been reading, animals'
genes are pack-ratty about saving information from ancestors. For
example, given the right GE signals, it should be possible to make a
human grow an insect wing on any part of their body, since we still have
those genes in a dormant state. I don't doubt that there are losses,
that unused information is eventually written over just as de-named
files on my hard drive are eventually written over, making them
impossible to undelete at some point in time, but at what rate does this
happen?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 11 2002 - 17:44:24 MDT