[p2p-research] steve tallbott on synthetic life
Michel Bauwens
michelsub2004 at gmail.com
Mon Jul 5 05:16:58 CEST 2010
building a human body is getting close?
or, dolls and robots?
I find using the right kind of language important, but that gets of course
in the way of transhumanist dreaming and utopianizing ... while some are
indeed dreaming the millenialist dreams of flight from the body of nature
... the oil keeps gushing in ...
it's a matter of focus really, and this is why transhumanist religion is so
dangerous for our future, it draws attention away
life is the basis of everhing, especially of you writing this letter, so
why is it a 'strange' standard ..? it's one of the most important ones there
is ..
Michel
On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 10:03 AM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Life is a strange standard. Why not go for functionality?
>
> If an old person can sit on a phone and talk to a computer that it cannot
> distinguish from a companion, then who is on the other side of the phone? A
> lie? A life? Would anyone care? As computer games get more sophisticated,
> those needing "real" outlets is probably going to drop. Reality is
> fun...ideal, but simulation can be great fun too and better and better
> simulations go a long way.
>
> Regardless, building a body is getting close. Building rationalizing
> machines is also seemingly on the feasible horizon. So, artificial flowers
> seems a rather strange retort to what is going on. The moral, social and
> political questions are far more interesting than the nihilism of...not
> really life.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 9:55 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> How to Manufacture the Notion of Synthetic Life
>> -----------------------------------------------
>>
>> I recently participated in a conference on synthetic biology (the
>> discipline where one attempts to synthesize, in part or in whole, new
>> organisms) at the Hastings Center in the lower Hudson Valley of New York.
>> A rather minor exchange at the very end of the conference has been working
>> on me ever since.
>>
>> The question of the value of artificial flowers (of the conventional
>> sort) had come up, and after a good deal of conversation, I remarked, "By
>> the way, I'd like to clarify a simple point. There has never been an
>> artificial plant that was even vaguely similar to a real one". This
>> produced a roomful of blank looks, puzzled expressions, and raised
>> eyebrows -- symptoms, I would submit, of the difficulty we have in
>> understanding life today.
>>
>> I went on to explain: a plant is living. It expresses itself into the
>> world as *movement*. It grows from seed to leaf to flower to fruit to
>> seed. (I ought, at this point, to have mimicked the opening of a flower
>> with my arms.) The plant *gestures* its existence; this gesturing, not
>> some frozen form or substance, is what it *is*. No artificial plant
>> duplicates this reality in any meaningful way.
>>
>> As I said, the point has been working on me. It brought to mind a talk
>> I heard ten or fifteen years ago by one of our then-local doctors, Philip
>> Incao. He asked those of us in the audience to close our eyes and take a
>> minute to imagine the human circulatory system. And, yes, we all
>> imagined
>> *things* -- the heart, arteries, veins, red blood cells, and so on. The
>> fact that the circulatory system is a system of movement -- that it is
>> most essentially a *doing* -- was hardly uppermost in our minds. Dr.
>> Incao went on to cite a remark by Novalis: the body is a formed stream.
>>
>> My colleague, Craig Holdrege, once illustrated this by explaining how
>> the spiraling fibers of the heart muscle that help to direct the blood in
>> its flow are themselves a congealed image of the swirling vortex of blood
>> within. This kind of mutuality holds even for the heart's basic
>> structural divisions:
>>
>> Before the heart has developed walls (septa) separating the four
>> chambers from each other, the blood already flows in two distinct
>> "currents" through the heart. The [currents] flowing through the
>> right and left sides of the heart do not mix, but stream and loop by
>> each other, just as two currents in a body of water. In the "still
>> water zone" between the two currents, the septum dividing the two
>> chambers forms. Thus the movement of the blood gives the parameters
>> for the inner differentiation of the heart, just as the looping heart
>> redirects the flow of blood. (*The Dynamic Heart and Circulation*,
>> edited by Craig Holdrege. Fair Oaks CA: AWSNA, 2002, p. 12)
>>
>> Our inherited mode of thought today tells us that things produce
>> movement. The more fundamental reality is just the opposite: particular
>> things crystallize out of the right sort of movement. The tendency to
>> materialize and, indeed, mechanize life in our imaginations, when
>> unchecked, pretty much determines our philosophical conclusions about life
>> before we ever get a conversation going on the subject. This is how we
>> manufacture the notion of synthetic life.
>>
>> It happens that in my own talk at the Hastings Center I had quoted the
>> twentieth-century cell biologist, Paul Weiss, to the effect that "Life is
>> a dynamic *process*. Logically, the elements of a process can be only
>> elementary *processes*, and not elementary *particles* or any other static
>> units". In a 1963 paper, Weiss wrote:
>>
>> Stable structures that are demonstrable in the living cell, other
>> than chromosomes, have mostly turned out to be secondary derivatives,
>> rather than primary carriers, of cellular organization . . . [There
>> is] such incessant reshuffling of the cell content that even the
>> thought that at last the supramolecular units (particulates) might be
>> linked into a stable framework can be safely dismissed . . . cell
>> contour, intracellular fiber systems, and granules of various
>> descriptions change their configurations and positions continuously,
>> thus ruling out the presence, or at any rate, the relevance, of a
>> consistent three-dimensional cytoskeleton . . . Yet despite the
>> absence of an orderly static frame, the various activities of all
>> parts remain coordinated in the maintenance of a standard pattern of
>> order in any given cell. It is an order of relations rather than of
>> fixed positions. ("The Cell as Unit", *Journal of Theoretical
>> Biology* vol. 5, 1963, pp. 389-97)
>>
>> There are countless molecular processes going on in the cell and
>> organism as a whole, continuing through time, and Weiss points out that
>> these are interlocking processes, like "civic activities in a community".
>> Every stage of every process must be in a certain proper correspondence
>> with every stage of every other process. The plant's movement, in other
>> words, is compounded of countless submovements, and these are harmonized
>> in the distinctive gesturing of the plant as a whole.
>>
>> I find it interesting to compare this line of thought with the notions
>> of someone like AI guru, Ray Kurzweil. After all, artificial
>> intelligence
>> researchers and synthetic biology researchers share much of the same
>> general naivete about life. In *The Age of Spiritual Machines* Kurzweil
>> talks about "reverse engineering" the brain by analyzing it, thin slice by
>> thin slice, and then "implementing" its neurons and their supposed inputs
>> and outputs in a computer.
>>
>> Suppose we could do far better than that. Suppose we didn't have to be
>> content with merely abstracting a few features from brains -- features
>> that a computer engineer such as Kurzweil (or anyone else) happens to
>> think, with rather blatant arbitrariness, are the few that really count.
>> (Actually, there is not a single feature of the embodied brain that is
>> faithfully captured in any computer model. But that is a point for
>> another time.) Assume instead that we could assemble precise replicas of
>> those brain slices, atom by atom, successively adding each slice to the
>> previous ones. Would we then have produced a living brain by artificial
>> means?
>>
>> The question is rather like asking whether an artificial flower is a
>> living flower. It is to have forgotten almost everything about the
>> reality of the brain. What has happened to the *movement*? For example,
>> as we were assembling those slices, how were the individual cells being
>> nourished? How were the intercellular fluids and blood circulating among
>> them? How were any living processes actually occurring in the cells --
>> the essential chemical signaling that takes place within and between
>> cells, enabling them to retain a living connection to each other; the
>> intricately coordinated replication of DNA; the entire elaborate process
>> of regulation of gene expression; cell division, bringing into movement
>> as
>> it does *everything* in the cell . . . ?
>>
>> It's one thing to assemble many pieces of a complex puzzle, and quite
>> another to establish a harmonious coordination among a complex set of
>> interweaving processes -- a coordination that would require the setting in
>> motion, at a particular instant, of every one of the countless elements of
>> the cell in exactly the right relation to all the other dynamic processes.
>> And the coordination would have to be so calculated that the thousands of
>> ongoing, continually interpenetrating processes would be held together as
>> a single, coherent whole -- held together through all the unforeseeable
>> disturbances and environmental encounters differentially affecting all
>> those interrelated processes as the synthetic organism traverses its path
>> through life. I see little evidence that the "synbio" proponents have
>> much appreciation of the real nature of their task.
>>
>> The tendency, I think, is to assume that you need only put the right
>> set of puzzle pieces together, and somehow the processes will
>> automatically start up and proceed as they ought. They will "emerge", as
>> the jargon goes, indicating a kind of mystical potential in the puzzle
>> pieces. This is why a number of commentators have recognized in the
>> supposedly all-explaining DNA of modern biology something like an
>> animistic totem or materialized entelechy.
>>
>> Remove this kind of materialized magic, and what would you actually
>> have after assembling the last molecules of your artificial brain? The
>> answer is easy: an object perfectly fitted for display in Madame Tussaud's
>> wax museum.
>>
>> You may think that such a thought experiment is ridiculously
>> simplistic. I agree. But thought experiments just like this one have
>> been common for decades in fields such as cognitive science. You can be
>> sure that proponents of today's "synthetic biology" will have a penchant
>> for similar mental excursions.
>>
>> At the Hastings conference there were in fact various references to the
>> possibility of assembling a living, single-celled organism from scratch,
>> molecule by molecule -- an organism that was "precisely identical" to some
>> already living organism. You'll note what's going on here. The
>> "precisely identical" idea comes from the image of an organism already
>> murdered in the imagination, just like the artificial plant that is
>> "indistinguishable" from a real one. The life was removed from the image
>> in advance, and so, of course, the artificial product becomes very
>> persuasive as a replica of the real one.
>>
>> It was evident that a number of the participants (the group was quite
>> diverse) simply took for granted the realistic prospects for such an
>> artificial construction. On my part, I do not even know what could be
>> meant by constructing an artificial cell "precisely identical" to a real
>> one. The real cell, after all, is never at two different moments
>> identical to *itself*, let alone to another cell. It's as much a gesture
>> as a thing.
>>
>> It's not only that life is movement. Equally important is the fact
>> that each kind of life displays a qualitatively distinct sort of movement.
>> When we bother to observe a real organism, we find that its gesturing is
>> recognizably different from that of other species. An oak tree does not
>> at all have the same way of being as a weeping willow, nor is an amoeba's
>> movement (whether at the level of the whole organism or of molecular
>> process) choreographed in the style of a paramecium's.
>>
>> If and when I hear synthetic biologists discussing among themselves how
>> they will reproduce such a unique gesturing -- a gesturing they must
>> carefully and deliberately and knowledgeably compound out of the
>> innumerable molecular activities proceeding simultaneously and
>> interdependently in the cell -- all in order to produce from scratch a
>> particular sort of organism with a particular sort of recognizable
>> character, then I will believe they have begun to glimpse a problem that
>> might just conceivably define a synthetic discipline of life. Otherwise,
>> we're left with little more than the crude and mostly ignorant,
>> trial-and-error manipulation of already living things.
>>
>> The work in synthetic biology as we have it today does in fact rely
>> thoroughly upon already living things. A synthetic construct is inserted
>> into a living organism, and the organism then takes it up (if the
>> experiment is successful) and incorporates it into its own being in its
>> own manner. If you want to know how this actually plays out in reality --
>> how the organism "does its own thing" with such foreign materials, often
>> in radically unexpected ways -- then check out the website, nontarget.org
>> .
>> No one who fairly reviews that website can come away thinking we have a
>> *science* of synthetic biology, as opposed to a technologically
>> sophisticated discipline of tinkering.
>>
>> In sum, the imagination at work in synthetic biology is grounded (often
>> without acknowledgment of the fact) in the world of living organisms --
>> organisms that are continually taken for granted, rarely observed as the
>> living, gesturing creatures they are, and then casually employed as a
>> means to assimilate and enliven artificial constructs. The result is
>> viewed as a triumph of clever artifice, which it doubtless is. But this
>> is no reason to lose sight of the creative contribution of the organism
>> itself. Through its living *activity* it proves wonderfully capable of
>> meeting the contents of its environment -- internal or external, natural
>> or artificially constructed -- and drawing them up into its own life.
>>
>> SLT
>>
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