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You have to understand things on their own terms. A lot of times you can find a biological process that resembles something in computer science, but you shouldn
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
You have to understand things on their own terms. A lot of times you can find a biological process that resembles something in computer science, but you shouldn't take the analogy too far. Nature doesn't know what a computer is, so any resemblance between a natural process and a computer is incidental.
You can't conceive nature as an engineer and talk about how sloppy and random its designs are. You have to bear in mind that nature has made things that we can scarcely comprehend, let alone engineer, so if you're critiquing its designs as if you can read its mind and see what it was trying to do, you're probably missing the point. It pulls off incredible things, so nature is the master and we're the student.
- delian66 13y ago>>You can't conceive nature as an engineer and talk about how sloppy and random its designs are. Why not? We can talk about how sloppy something is from a given perspective; we do it all the time, and then try to improve things (there will be no progress otherwise), and if we succeed/fail, learn more ... >>as if you can read its mind Nature/evolution is not a sentient being, thus has no mind. Do you have evidence to the contrary ?
- mtdewcmu 13y agoWhen you look at something designed by a person, you can intuit what they were doing and judge it as good or sloppy. Nature requires a completely different type of thinking. It's ultimately unhelpful to anthropomorphize nature.