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There has been what I think is direct evidence of the possibility of this in the digital world. Adrian Thompson's work[1] in evolving an FPGA circuit to tell th
by sriku 8y ago
There has been what I think is direct evidence of the possibility of this in the digital world. Adrian Thompson's work[1] in evolving an FPGA circuit to tell the difference between the spoken words "stop" and "go" (yes .. digital circuit design with an analogue task) threw many surprises. The evolved circuit was highly economical with gates and didn't use a clock. It had also started exploiting the specific physics of the FPGA chip and included transmitters and receivers. Digitally "useless" structures were critical to its performance.
If this is true of a simple evolved circuit - i.e. the connection between the circuit specification and the behaviour being complex, with the circuit specification already encoding physics beyond the digital gates - then I'm not sure what hope we should actually place in statistical attempts to connect genes with organism behaviour.
Pushing the link a bit more, just as the circuit representation went beyond the target domain of digital circuits, could what is encoded in our genes explicitly encode exploitations at quantum level? With this, the possibility of brain structures acquiring quantum error correction schemes doesn't seem too far fetched or crazy thought.
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
- adrianN 8y agoWhat do you mean with "quantum level"? All of biochemistry is best described by quantum mechanics. Do you mean large scale entanglement and coherence as would be required for quantum computation? That seems a bit unlikely in a warm soup like our bodies. We haven't been able to achieve it on a useful scale even in the controlled environments of physics labs.
- NegativeLatency 8y agoSounds like some measurement threshold of what degree a cellular process is reliant on quantum effects. (Maybe something like electron tunneling or photon wave/particle behavior?)
- sriku 8y ago> All of biochemistry is best described by quantum mechanics. .. much the same as all of what the FPGA does is captured by electromagnetism + material physics. Nevertheless, the encoding of the FPGA circuit, while it describes a digital process, can hack into the features of a level below. Similar to that, while gene sequences may encode protein production, I'm wondering whether the resultant system could similarly make explicit use of below-the-protein-level features. Our inability to achieve that yet is not an argument, much the same as a digital circuit designer will be at a loss to make a "stop" versus "go" detector and that too one without a clock.
- NegativeLatency 8y ago> statistical attempts to connect genes with organism behaviour It reminds me of the halting problem and modern semantic analysis methods for programs. IE some things you can determine without running the code (static analysis of code or dna), and to determine other things you have to run the the code and see (determine if a program will ever end or see if a trait is expressed).