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<p>Marcus wrote:<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal">That was Glen. (My explanation is just
that we have limited short term memory and can’t tolerate any
other representation than terribly compressed forms. So it
is hard to gain confidence in simulations because we can’t get
them entirely in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason
very effectively about how mutations will change their
behavior. The natural world has no such hesitation.)</p>
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<p><not-snark> I wonder if perhaps that "the natural world"
*does* have such hesitation in the sense you cop to here... and
suggest that when this happens it is exactly what we call
"life". We fat-brained humans with elaborate language are just
the (known) apex of this process that bootstraps itself up some
kind of tower-of-babel style complexity (to increase our ability
to hold more and more and more qualitatively and quantitatively
"in our heads"). Clay tablets unto nanodots (and beyond) and
proto-abacii unto quantum computers (and beyond) represent our
progress toward extending our phenotypes represent our attempts to
expand (transcend?) the reasons for our hesitation. <br>
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<p>Is "life itself" and "consciousness" by extension, somehow the
urge (an inevitable self-organizing trend itself?) toward a
particular type of self-organization?<br>
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<p></not snark></p>
<p>- Steve<br>
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