From: avatar (avatar@renegadeclothing.com.au)
Date: Fri Jan 10 2003 - 19:25:08 MST
This popular theory (memory in dna) is also brought ought in the whole Dune saga [and Star Trek and Alastair Reynolds and dozens of others]. Another popular stream in Dune is of course (it is perhaps the main theme) the relevance of humans vs. computers ("thinking machines" [as set out in the Butlerian Jihad etc.]) as initially conceived of in the 1950s vision of "us" vs. "them" (i.e. pre-nanotech, since nanotech makes the degree of "artificiality" a streaming process, of choice, from within the cell to the macro level, and additionally provides programmable capability for dna which can be inserted and removed, i.e. it makes being totally organically human something which is also malleable). Both messages are in retrospect oversimplifications. As a final thought, the intra/inter cellular molecular supercomputers that Drexler envisages can be described as an extension of DNA and indeed a supervisory extension of DNA, and are described as being capable of memory transfer - they are therefore in a sense one mechanism of encoding information (since they are described as self-checking) which could include any information, perhaps even memory. However there will be limitations to the amount of storage capable. This system while perfectly adequate for maintaining a human or human-modified body for hundreds of millions of years and storing smaller items such as a library will probably be less efficient than types of computronium for heavier memory storage.
I agree with Anders about waste. Evolution does not always produce the most efficient result or the most rational course. High school biology teaches you this. Evolution only streams with environmental pressure influencing reproduction. In the absence of such pressure it does not act. Nor does it reverse course following complex paths (too difficult since change is generated randomly). Instead if pressure is great is seeks a similar solution through the existing architecture. For example, whales do not regress to gills but attempt to adapt lungs to cope with shorter periods of access to air.
I always laugh at Larry Niven's joke in World of Ptaavs - the alien with giant chromosones which are thus resistant to mutation.
Cosmic rays (there are other factors of course) are the major player in mutation. Drexler pays some attention to them of course. C rays - gotta love em! Guess evolution might not have developed us in time without them (time being the Big Fry 500 million years down the track [that was the last estimate I heard, substantially sooner than my childhood reading estimates - for effective sterilization of the Earth through changes in the Sun's structure]).
I guess there is a question about intelligence and the Singularity. The Singularity is inevitable, and linked to the development of intelligence. Since developed brains are roughly (somewhat under 500 million) years old, what held back the Singularity for 100s of millions of years? The 5 or 6 mass extinctions? Something in mammalian neural architecture (seems unlikely to me, but maybe socially derived language and increased pathways between "rooms" of primate neural architecture may be a candidate)? Or perhaps we are being "fooled" by the speed of the Singularity. Maybe it's like gunpowder, once it's ignited BOOM (a mere 1.5 million years and that's it, there it is). So there are no "half-way houses" (half-cognizant dinosaurs) and no "fizzled" attempts towards the Singularity in the past.
All this relates in part to the notion of consciousness as a separate construct to sentiency and to what it extent it derives from a group process rather than an internal species-relevant process.
Towards Ascension
Avatar Polymorph
34 After Armstrong
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anders Sandberg" <asa@nada.kth.se>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 11, 2003 3:12 AM
Subject: Re: DNA data storage
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 08:54:06AM -0600, Extropian Agro Forestry Ventures Inc. wrote:
> > I've said this for years.
> > All that "idle" dna in a human or other genome might be how "instinct"
> > and even
> > possibly active memory is archived.
>
> No. As I memory researcher I have to put down my foot here :-)
>
> The introns are mostly composed to my knowledge of transposable
> elements, little more than devolved viruses or the equivalent of
> "copy me!" signs. There is no evidence I know of for any
> information being transcribed from them (beside the transponase)
> in the brain.
>
> While memory does have an interaction with DNA, it is through the
> cascade neural activity -> protein phosphorylation ->
> activation/deactivation of genetic switches -> protein synthesis
> -> changes in the neuron. Very complex and interesting, but no
> place for the idle DNA.
>
> Instincts are very interesting firmwired sets of reactions (like
> the common insect and snake phobias of primates or sexual arousal
> when viewing appropriate secondary and primary sexual organs) that
> somehow link rather complex perceptions to various drives. Beats
> me how it is done, but there is definitely a genetic factor here.
> But it seems rather unlikely this has anything to do with silent
> DNA, rather with the active DNA.
>
> Besides, apparently birds have little or no introns, but they
> still exhibit plenty of insticts.
>
>
> People once thought that memory was stored in DNA or RNA, and it
> was a popular theory. The famous experiments with flatworms whose
> memories seemed to be transferrable through eating appeared to
> support this view. But they were flawed, and today the consensus
> is that memory is stored in synaptic states, as ion and second
> messenger concentrations (the shortest forms), protein
> phosporylation states, protein concentrations and structural
> changes.
>
> There is some debate on how active memory (what I'm thinking about
> *right now*) is stored. A popular idea is reverberatory activity
> within network of connected neurons. This may be augmented by very
> fast synaptic changes (see an upcoming paper by A. Sandberg on
> this issue :-), but the evidence is still hazy.
>
> To sum up, there is probably no Elder Eddas within our silent DNA.
> I find it rather comforting.
>
> > Nature never wastes resources.
>
> Yes it does. Nature wastes a lot of resources when not wasting
> them would be more wasteful. We do not absorb all the nutrients of
> our food, we have a lot more neurons than we actually require for
> function, most animal young get eaten or killed and plenty of
> resources are wasted by birds in mating displays. In the first
> example a less wastegul digestion would likely not be worth it
> evolutionarily, since the extra energy and nutrient requirements
> of a better gut would make the resulting organism less fit than
> one with a worse but simpler gut. In the second example a less
> redundant brain would be more vulnerable to damage; the optimal
> amount of redundancy depends on the level of brain damage danger
> in the environment, and that is estimated very roughly through
> fitness. And so on. Nature is abundant and wastes a lot, because
> it only deals with local maxima of fitness, fitness estimates are
> very noisy and the environment changes in a complex fashion,
> moving the maxima around. A nature that never wasted resources
> would never bother with vertebrates.
>
>
> > Bacteria that have high resistances to heat, radiation would make good
> > extracorporeal data archives.
>
> I wonder if they really would. The length of a typical bacterial
> genome is around 1.8 million base pairs (H. influenzae), which
> means one could get in around a megabit or so per strain. The
> human genome is a few billion base pairs, so here we could
> probably hide a few gigabits. But that is still less than is
> stored right now on my hard drive, and far less than the tape
> archive in the institute cellar.
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
> asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
> GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
>
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