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Peruvian Nights

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Ryan Gelpke

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“If we analyse the classes of life, we readily find that there are three cardinal classes which are radically distinct in function. A short analysis will disclose to us that, though minerals have various activities, they are not "living." The plants have a very definite and well known function-the transformation of solar energy into organic chemical energy. They are a class of life which appropriates one kind of energy, converts it into another kind and stores it up; in that sense they are a kind of storage battery for the solar energy; and so I define THE PLANTS AS THE CHEMISTRY-BINDING class of life. The animals use the highly dynamic products of the chemistry-binding class-the plants-as food, and those products-the results of plant-transformation-undergo in animals a further transformation into yet higher forms; and the animals are correspondingly a more dynamic class of life; their energy is kinetic; they have a remarkable freedom and power which the plants do not possess-I mean the freedom and faculty to move about in space; and so I define ANIMALS AS THE SPACE-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE. And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them-I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.”

LifeManAnimalsOrganismsPlants
Book:Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering
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“Joscha: For me a very interesting discovery in the last year was the word spirit—because I realized that what “spirit” actually means: It’s an operating system for an autonomous robot. And when the word was invented, people needed this word, but they didn’t have robots that built themselves yet; the only autonomous robots that were known were people, animals, plants, ecosystems, cities and so on. And they all had spirits. And it makes sense to say that a plant is an operating system, right? If you pinch the plant in one area, then it’s going to have repercussions throughout the plant. Everything in the plant is in some sense connected into some global aesthetics, like in other organisms. An organism is not a collection of cells; it’s a function that tells cells how to behave. And this function is not implemented as some kind of supernatural thing, like some morphogenetic field, it is an emergent result of the interactions of each cell with each other cell. Lex: Oh my god, so what you’re saying is the organism is a function that tells the cells what to do? And the function emerges from the interaction of the cells. Joscha: Yes. So it’s basically a description of what the plant is doing in terms of macro-states. And the macro-states, the physical implementation are too many of them to describe them, so the software that we use to describe what a plant is doing—this spirit of the plant—is the software, the operating system of the plant, right? This is a way in which we, the observers, make sense of the plant. The same is true for people, so people have spirits, which is their operating system in a way, right, and there’s aspects of that operating system that relate to how your body functions, and others how you socially interact, how you interact with yourself and so on. And we make models of that spirit and we think it’s a loaded term because it’s from a pre-scientific age, but it took the scientific age a long time to rediscover a term that is pretty much the same thing and I suspect that the differences that we still see between the old word and the new word are translation errors that over the centuries.”

SpiritCultureNatureFunctionIntelligenceSoftwareOrganismsRobotsLex Fridman PodcastTuring Machine
Author:Joscha Bach
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