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Imagine trying to understand biology like we try to understand what we code day to day. I would need a brain at least 100x as large and efficient.
by Jaygles 7y ago
Imagine trying to understand biology like we try to understand what we code day to day. I would need a brain at least 100x as large and efficient.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- peller 7y agoThere are early efforts under way to do just that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg
- hprotagonist 7y agoThis is "the andy grove fallacy": it's not clear that you actually can, because code and computational hardware was designed by humans and biology emphatically was not. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/andy_grove_rich_famous_smart_and_wrong http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/and...
- paulsutter 7y agoWouldn’t it need to be clear that we can’t, before it can be called a fallacy?
- hprotagonist 7y agofsvo "proof", i'm willing to take it as an axiom that biological systems are fractally weird in ways that are extremely resistant to formalism.
- paulsutter 7y agoThe patterns will be understood, by machines in whole and by people in part. To think it’s impossible seems ... religious
- mvcalder 7y agoHuh, From where I sit, to think it's possible seems ... religous. To each his own I guess.
- stevenhuang 7y agoBut to think it won't _ever_ be possible? After a thousand years of research?
- hprotagonist 7y agoin a thousand years, of course, the things we're researching will be a thousand years differently evolved. My point, mostly, is that any "law" of biology i've ever encountered has an "except sometimes when ..." clause. I do not expect that to change; biology is best described in the language of probability, and evolution (if i may anthropomorphize it so without peril) is very good at ruthlessly exploiting edge cases.
- barkingcat 7y agoThat's not a difficult thing to imagine at all! Many mathematical problems have been unsolved in spite of a few thousands years of research! And math isn't nearly as weird as biological systems!
- barkingcat 7y ago
- jdironman 7y agoWe are just in the debugging phase.
- hprotagonist 7y agoi've been doing biological/biomedical research for about 20 years now (god, that's a scary thought...) I don't think that biology is well modeled by "being a meat computer", in general, but as far as the analogy goes ... : What we are debugging is 4.5 billion years of grad student code in at least a few dozen languages, with no documentation, method names that are outright lies, no separation of concerns at all, the worst spaghetti you've ever seen, god-objects everywhere, no separated state at all, spooky action at a distance, the whole spiel. We don't have a reliable debugger, you can't trace the stack because the stack changes when you look at it, and the entire thing is running all the time and mutating in a really nasty feedback loop with you. Oh and there is no software, there's only FPGA-like firmware that reprograms itself all the time and can decide to add or remove logic units basically whenever, or wrap itself in duct tape and baling wire.
- OG_BME 7y agoWell said, I'm a biomedical engineer and even the cutting edge of research in this field is crushingly far from finding the capital T Truth of biology.
- 52-6F-62 7y agoThis literally made me laugh out loud. I’m glad I just got in before I read it. Well done, and I can only assume: well put.
- dekhn 7y agothis is literally why I went into bio after learning to program: I thought it was like being told "this is a computer, but we have no manual, so just hack and let us know if you find something interesting". 30 years later, I'm back in computers because I can't deal with the constant ambiguity in bio.
- perl4ever 7y ago
- tolstoshev 7y agoI'm starting to wonder if there are physical limits to cognition and if we've already hit them. Maybe it's impossible for the physical universe to understand its own complexity.
- oever 7y agoDNA is spagetti code.
- ksaj 7y agoI would have thought fusilli.