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That's an interesting thought. It's like they posses "artificial intelligence", i.e. they behave like the famous paper clip maximizer.

by cJ0th 12y ago

TeMPOraL 12y ago
No, that's just evolution - plain, simple and extremely dumb. Viruses don't really "want" anything, they are just biomolecular machines that run around replicating themselves and screwing things up; some manage to copy themselves, some don't - and this way, generation after generation, you're left with those viruses that are good at copying themselves in the environment they're in. Evolution is a statistical phenomenon.
- saulrh 12y ago
  Except that, depending on your definition of "intelligence", evolution even as a statistical process fits most to all of the criteria necessary to be intelligent. Basically any definition of intelligence that fits the stuff you see in the movies will also tend to fit evolution. "Has goals, biases set of possible futures toward completing those goals, demonstrates creativity", and so on. It's just that evolution, as an intelligent entity, is utterly, unbelievably alien - psychologically, physically, and 'physiologically'. Which I guess makes sense, right? Aliens aren't going to have rubber foreheads and five fingers; they're going to be utterly unbelievably alien.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    True, but it's a kind of a "null garbage collector" case. It's the dumbest type of intelligence, a random one. But it did also created intelligences less dumb than itself, if you view the evolutionary process as separate from the workings of human mind.
  - ajkjk 12y ago
    This splits into two points: 1. You're right, our intelligence is the same thing. Intellect is a statistical creation that makes us good at surviving. 2. But usually, when people talk about our intelligence and our having goals, they aren't talking about the fact that we statistically exhibit tendencies towards self-preservation (which is what we're talking about viruses doing). It's that we literally have conceptual goals, which can be written down ahead of time and talked about. aka you won't find a virus with a to-do list. Conflating that intelligence with viral 'intelligence' is kinda disingeuous. -- That said, I do agree that we might/will find alien life that looks nothing like what we expect and has 'intelligence', for some reasonable (non-virus) definition. I would not be inordinately surprised if we managed to find this in the motion of waves in the ocean, or in the swirling gases of the sun, or the gravitational interactions of the asteroid belt, or in tremors in the earth, or in hive-minds of billions of ants. And I definitely reject dualism and fully expect that a human brain simulated in a computer would be as intelligent as we are. I'm not sure what the criteria for an 'intelligence medium' is, but it seems to require sufficiently high entropy to allow for complex patterns to form, but not too high - there has to be enough order and especially a not-too-high temperature such that self-contained systems can form and replicate without being blurred back into the whole system.
- Dn_Ab 12y ago
  In other settings, a simple approximation of what Evolution does will balance your portfolio and find Nash Equilibriums for zero sum games much more quickly than linear programming (query: multiplicative update evolution). Having to wait for things to die can be restrictive (but genomes are declarative, what does that buy?). Roughly, with what amounts to the assumption that Lamarckian evolution is more or less not true, you can characterize evolution's learning power as almost as good as PAC (query: statistical query learning evolution). See alsos: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/601.html http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/601.htm... http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.4037 http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.4037: Natural selection. V. How to read the fundamental equations of evolutionary change in terms of information theory
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Thanks for the references, I'll check them out after work :).
snowwrestler 12y ago
Obviously viruses are not intelligent and they don't "want" to reproduce. However, they do reproduce, just like pretty much every other form of life. The question of why life does that is closely related to the question of what life is and how it came to exist. Those are deep questions and we don't really have a clue as to the answer right now. There's certainly nothing in the fundamental physical laws of the universe, as we understand them today, that seems to indicate or require the existence of life.
- john_b 12y ago
  Fundamentally life is just patterns of information and their associated support structures capable of reproducing and adapting to their environment. There really is no answer to the question of "why" life reproduces because life that does not reproduce ceases to be life. The reproduction component is inherent in its definition. As to why our universe is one which supports life, nobody really knows. Some invoke the anthropic principle, but that is more of a philosophical answer than a scientific one.
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    > As to why our universe is one which supports life, nobody really knows. There's an implicit distinction in this statement, between the universe and life. Really, life is part of the universe too. I'm familiar with the anthropic principle, but it doesn't tell us whether life is a necessary outcome of the physical laws of our universe, or whether it's just one of many accidental outcomes that are not forbidden by the laws of our universe. Both of those situations satisfy the anthropic principle, but are very different. For example, we could speculate about a universe in which the nuclear strong force is stronger than it is here. Based on our theories of quantum mechanics and gravity, we can predict how that would affect, for example, star formation. Isaac Asimov explores this idea in "The Gods Themselves." But Asimov also predicts what alien life would be like in that universe, and there he's on much shakier ground, because nothing in our theories of quantum mechanics or gravity predicts life. We don't know how chemical systems become alive...there's even not solid agreement on the definitions.
- Justsignedup 12y ago

That's an interesting thought. It's like they posses "artificial intelligence", i.e. they behave like the famous paper clip maximizer.

by cJ0th 12y ago

That's an interesting thought. It's like they posses "artificial intelligence", i.e. they behave like the famous paper clip maximizer.

TeMPOraL 12y ago

No, that's just evolution - plain, simple and extremely dumb. Viruses don't really "want" anything, they are just biomolecular machines that run around replicating themselves and screwing things up; some manage to copy themselves, some don't - and this way, generation after generation, you're left with those viruses that are good at copying themselves in the environment they're in. Evolution is a statistical phenomenon.

saulrh 12y ago
Except that, depending on your definition of "intelligence", evolution even as a statistical process fits most to all of the criteria necessary to be intelligent. Basically any definition of intelligence that fits the stuff you see in the movies will also tend to fit evolution. "Has goals, biases set of possible futures toward completing those goals, demonstrates creativity", and so on. It's just that evolution, as an intelligent entity, is utterly, unbelievably alien - psychologically, physically, and 'physiologically'. Which I guess makes sense, right? Aliens aren't going to have rubber foreheads and five fingers; they're going to be utterly unbelievably alien.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  True, but it's a kind of a "null garbage collector" case. It's the dumbest type of intelligence, a random one. But it did also created intelligences less dumb than itself, if you view the evolutionary process as separate from the workings of human mind.
- ajkjk 12y ago
  This splits into two points: 1. You're right, our intelligence is the same thing. Intellect is a statistical creation that makes us good at surviving. 2. But usually, when people talk about our intelligence and our having goals, they aren't talking about the fact that we statistically exhibit tendencies towards self-preservation (which is what we're talking about viruses doing). It's that we literally have conceptual goals, which can be written down ahead of time and talked about. aka you won't find a virus with a to-do list. Conflating that intelligence with viral 'intelligence' is kinda disingeuous. -- That said, I do agree that we might/will find alien life that looks nothing like what we expect and has 'intelligence', for some reasonable (non-virus) definition. I would not be inordinately surprised if we managed to find this in the motion of waves in the ocean, or in the swirling gases of the sun, or the gravitational interactions of the asteroid belt, or in tremors in the earth, or in hive-minds of billions of ants. And I definitely reject dualism and fully expect that a human brain simulated in a computer would be as intelligent as we are. I'm not sure what the criteria for an 'intelligence medium' is, but it seems to require sufficiently high entropy to allow for complex patterns to form, but not too high - there has to be enough order and especially a not-too-high temperature such that self-contained systems can form and replicate without being blurred back into the whole system.
Dn_Ab 12y ago
In other settings, a simple approximation of what Evolution does will balance your portfolio and find Nash Equilibriums for zero sum games much more quickly than linear programming (query: multiplicative update evolution). Having to wait for things to die can be restrictive (but genomes are declarative, what does that buy?). Roughly, with what amounts to the assumption that Lamarckian evolution is more or less not true, you can characterize evolution's learning power as almost as good as PAC (query: statistical query learning evolution). See alsos: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/601.html http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/601.htm... http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.4037 http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.4037: Natural selection. V. How to read the fundamental equations of evolutionary change in terms of information theory
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Thanks for the references, I'll check them out after work :).

snowwrestler 12y ago

Obviously viruses are not intelligent and they don't "want" to reproduce. However, they do reproduce, just like pretty much every other form of life. The question of why life does that is closely related to the question of what life is and how it came to exist. Those are deep questions and we don't really have a clue as to the answer right now. There's certainly nothing in the fundamental physical laws of the universe, as we understand them today, that seems to indicate or require the existence of life.

john_b 12y ago
Fundamentally life is just patterns of information and their associated support structures capable of reproducing and adapting to their environment. There really is no answer to the question of "why" life reproduces because life that does not reproduce ceases to be life. The reproduction component is inherent in its definition. As to why our universe is one which supports life, nobody really knows. Some invoke the anthropic principle, but that is more of a philosophical answer than a scientific one.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  > As to why our universe is one which supports life, nobody really knows. There's an implicit distinction in this statement, between the universe and life. Really, life is part of the universe too. I'm familiar with the anthropic principle, but it doesn't tell us whether life is a necessary outcome of the physical laws of our universe, or whether it's just one of many accidental outcomes that are not forbidden by the laws of our universe. Both of those situations satisfy the anthropic principle, but are very different. For example, we could speculate about a universe in which the nuclear strong force is stronger than it is here. Based on our theories of quantum mechanics and gravity, we can predict how that would affect, for example, star formation. Isaac Asimov explores this idea in "The Gods Themselves." But Asimov also predicts what alien life would be like in that universe, and there he's on much shakier ground, because nothing in our theories of quantum mechanics or gravity predicts life. We don't know how chemical systems become alive...there's even not solid agreement on the definitions.
Justsignedup 12y ago