What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018

I'm very excited to see where we'll be in another 10 years. The possibilities in terms of medical and industrial applications seems hard to overstate. Related, but one of the best talks I've ever seen was this 2018 talk on the subject. It gets into how organisms seem to have bioelectrical patterns that store information separately from genomic, anatomical states. These bioelectrical patterns play a huge role in developmental processes, as they appear to control how the organism is structured at a high level. As a layman and a programmer, to me it sounds like the genome is the actual implementation of a function and the bioelectrical pattern is the sequence of functions you want to execute. They're able to manipulate these bioelectrical patterns to do things like replace a worms tail with another head. It's absolutely crazy to think about what could be possible here. [this video]

Yes, exactly. Is the human body centralized or decentralized? The ego could be said to be the central "pivot" of the system, but then you have the phenomenon of "multiple personalities", and so on. Once you start to think of biology as the study of billion-year-old self-optimizing nanotechnology it makes sense to look to life for models for designing the structure of our own artificial systems. There's the question of what do we want to be like? A starfish? A meta-human? A decentralized system that depends on each or most of its elements to function is a single "point" of failure for the whole. (E.g., a relatively small wound can cause death by exsanguination.) On the other hand, consider the radical indignities that the lowly planarian will endure only to placidly regrow a tail or a head or whatever. (See "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" [this video] [link] Which, incidentally, adds a whole layer of complexity and nuance to the concept of intelligent design , since the whole of Nature has now been scientifically shown to think ...) It remains to be seen whether Humans + Internet = Self-Organization or along what lines. (What's the news out of Hong Kong this week? Are the distributed, self-organizing people of HK prevailing against the centralized imperialistic communist state?) Governments everywhere are waking up and smelling the data coffee. The major players already have databases on the bulk of world population and are collecting (

Computers can’t heal themselves. Our bodies do that on their own without conscious prompting. Humans evolve the complexity of a computers electron states, not the computers own inherent properties. My use doesn’t force transistors to evolve into better transistors. It has no self regeneration. You don’t see the issue in principle but here you have an article by an expert pointing them out. Perhaps be a better listener? A computer has observable, literal limitations relative to a humans mechanical functionality. You can’t scrape away literal reality to arrive at some reductionist idea of what a consciousness is. Our only known good model for a machine that can create our consciousness is us. It took billions of years of the universe churning at random to accidentally generate us. We have no clue how to replicate that scale. A computer literally lacks a whole lot of literal information that’s embedded in the hardware and software of a person. Watch this and tell me the last time your computer reconfigured it’s literal shape when you altered its electric field properties: [this video] There’s something to “life” we’ll never be able to jam into silicon.

> As described, the individual plant is not the friend, but rather the spirit of its species. Aye. > I have no way to properly apprehend any of this. Sure you do! You're a living being too, eh? :) You've got all the hardware, you just need to learn the protocols. It's not that hard to learn, the hardest part is "letting your hair down" so to speak. Check out the recent scientific advances from Michael Levin's lab's work, e.g. "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" - NeurIPS 2018 [this video] [link] [link] In a nutshell, whatever "thought" is, the biomolecular machinery that supports it is common to all cells (not just neurons.) In other words, all cellular life "thinks". Combine that insight with the "Law Of Regulatory Models" from Cybernetics, to wit: "every good regulator of a system must be (contain) a model of that system." and it seems to me that we have a solid basis to talk about "nature spirits", eh?