The Spirit in the Machine

Dan Parker (danparker@CONNECT.AB.CA)
Thu, 17 Apr 1997 23:28:19 -0600


than what their designers have put into them. Learning can be put in,
but how can information that we don't understand be extended into a
machine's system. If the materials that make up these machines were
good processors of this type of knowledge, then why did biological
lifeforms pick it up and evolve rather than resins etc.

If people are nest hierarchially within the globe, and the globe is
nested hierarchially with the galaxy, and so on to the universe and the
other side of black holes, then it would seem information would have to
flow through this hierarchy. A wild speculation might be that police
keep hiring seers, because they can pick up a thread that extends to the
global or galatic level, where the probabilities of what will happen in
the next century are like our determination of the probabilities of what
will happen in the next second.

I tend to disagree with the part of PCP that states evolving to a higher
level, will not result in a dimishment of the individual in the same way
when cells became us, they did not lose any of their funcitioning
capability. In contrast to the handoff to machine idea, I think
individuals will have to develop far more to handle the
interconnectivity, in addition to their current autopoetic information
processing. This is not a big deal if one knows how the present
education system works. Well enough non-science for today.

Dan Parker