I drank five or six cups of coffee a day for decades. I’d even have a cup before going to bed — that’s how tolerant I had become.
Got a mild flu/Covid/cold couple years ago. Better in a week. But, during the illness and since, the slightest bit of caffeine would make be incredibly wired to the point of panic attacks. Had to quit cold turkey. I’ve tried a cup now and again, and it’s the same thing: 6 hours of overwhelming anxiety.
Wierd. It’s like I became hypersensitive to caffeine. Oddly, though, nicotine doesn’t have that effect, and I always figured the two stimulants were similar.
> If there is a god then humanity is probably something akin to an ant farm to it. To expect god to care about any particular person is like trying to care about one particular ant in a colony
That analogy doesn’t hold.
I have an ant farm.
But, I didn’t make the ants.
I notice people rarely think about both sides of the question.
That is, as an exercise, assume that there is a God. And, then based on what you know of the world, yourself, humanity, etc, what conclusions can you draw about the nature of God.
Messing around with Euclid’s postulates is similar. Start out by assuming, for instance, parallel lines always meet, or the angles of a triangle always exceed 180. Take those as givens and explore the ramifications.
You seem to be starting out with an assumption of God, but then immediately finding an apparent contradiction. “We’d just be like ants…” or, you might have said, “he couldn’t be both benevolent and Omnimpotent due to burned up babies, etc”
That’s no different being asked to omit one of Euclids postulates and then complaining that the whole system gaps apart. Well, it doesn’t. In fact, such seemingly absurd exercises can lead to profound insights about the universe (spherical remotely, relativity, imaginary numbers).
Pascal did this.
He assumes there is a god, and then explored what that must mean. He didn’t assume there was a god and then Look for ways to disprove him… that’s backwards. If you truly wish to explore, you assume God exists and try to figure out how this world could possibly make sense given that assumed fact.
The parent comment is just straightforwardly true though. Researchers have even quantified how many bits of information cellular sensory systems can encode. Just because cells are too complicated to fully simulate doesn’t mean they don’t have behavior that could be described as if/then logic
Indeed.
In fact, there is no reason to believe some stochiastic if/then process could ever result in the type of morphogenesis we see in the video.
Whence comes this assumption that life may be reduced to a set of Boolean logic rules?
Such people either have no clue how computers work or no clue how biology works. (Or both.)
“Some proteins act kinda like if/then statements, so therefore the transformation of a single cell into a salamander is basically just a computer program.” You might as well say “My computer has a water-cooled processor, so it’s basically a salamander.”
Your counter to life being machines is just baselessly discrediting those of the opinion. Ad-hominem.
Considering a cell to be a single machine does not make it equivalent to another machine (a computer), and certainly doesn't make that other machine equivalent to the millions of cells we just saw divide. "A is a machine, B is a machine, therefore A is B" - a false equivalence.
Cells are conclusively machines, by the definition that they execute a fixed purpose dictated in whole by the parts it was made of - parts that we can change to modify the operation of the machine, a well studied subject used extensively in e.g. pharma (reprogrammed bacteria is how people get insulin).
That conscious life is poorly understood does not somehow change the fact that the only building block used to make it in nature is a small biomechanical automaton.
While we love to glorify our own existence and capabilities, our recent advances in LLMs also show how simple machines - even if significantly flawed due to practical resource limitations and intentional design limitations - can end projecting a convincing mimicry of our conscious behavior, despite having a simple, phrase-completing nature. It might make you wonder what simple initial purpose might dictate our behavior.
You also clearly misunderstood - I was not implying simplicity, just that a cell is a machine, and at the scale of one cell as the comment referred to it is possible to understand what is going on.
The idea that this should be backed up by simulating a large and complicated multi-cellular organism is a bit ridiculous. Even complete understanding would not imply that something is easy to simulate.
