10 ms·

Cells mode of operation is statistical, on average they produce a certain amount of molecules and consume a certain amount of molecules, mediated by signals tha

Cells mode of operation is statistical, on average they produce a certain amount of molecules and consume a certain amount of molecules, mediated by signals that are themselves molecules, but the transport and execution mechanism is stochastic and its basically impossible to predict what molecule will hit which receptor at a macro timescale Not saying that that is what consciousness is, but one fundamental difference is that below all the abstraction layers one system operates off chaos, so they are fundamentally different

whimsicalism 4y ago
it is only impossible to predict due to limited compute and quantum effects. I disagree that they are fundamentally different - you have just defined one thing to be chaos and not the other.
mbreese 4y ago
I don’t know which electrons are going to go through a particular logic gate either, but I’m still pretty sure that 1 XOR 0 is still 1. I’m a bit rusty, but I’m pretty sure quantum theory suggests that I never will be able to know. If you spend enough time with biology, the messy parts are all abstracted away and what you’re left with are observations of things we can measure. How much of protein X, migration of cell Y, etc. You don’t need to know what a specific molecule is doing, only what the population of those molecules is doing. It’s not so much a statistical problem as it is an observability problem. And while not exactly for the same quantum reason as Heisenberg, you quickly hit the the same problem — you can’t observe the location of an exact molecule without affecting the system. The real point being — these are all abstractions on top of abstractions. And while you can measure things at one level, the level underneath may be a complete mess. But to discount a computer compared to biology because we “understand” it all is silly to me. We also “understand” a lot about biology. Especially that complex behaviors can result from very simple inputs/instructions. At the core, we are very complex biological systems. But systems with rules and patterns nonetheless.

whimsicalism 4y ago

it is only impossible to predict due to limited compute and quantum effects. I disagree that they are fundamentally different - you have just defined one thing to be chaos and not the other.

mbreese 4y ago

I don’t know which electrons are going to go through a particular logic gate either, but I’m still pretty sure that 1 XOR 0 is still 1. I’m a bit rusty, but I’m pretty sure quantum theory suggests that I never will be able to know. If you spend enough time with biology, the messy parts are all abstracted away and what you’re left with are observations of things we can measure. How much of protein X, migration of cell Y, etc. You don’t need to know what a specific molecule is doing, only what the population of those molecules is doing. It’s not so much a statistical problem as it is an observability problem. And while not exactly for the same quantum reason as Heisenberg, you quickly hit the the same problem — you can’t observe the location of an exact molecule without affecting the system. The real point being — these are all abstractions on top of abstractions. And while you can measure things at one level, the level underneath may be a complete mess. But to discount a computer compared to biology because we “understand” it all is silly to me. We also “understand” a lot about biology. Especially that complex behaviors can result from very simple inputs/instructions. At the core, we are very complex biological systems. But systems with rules and patterns nonetheless.