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Synthetic Life In The Lab
niktesla writes "Scientific American is carrying a story about
sythetic life - genetic engineered "machines" made from DNA building blocks called "BioBricks". The goal is to produce a library of building blocks that can be assembled to give predictable results. Reminds me of the technology behind Blade Runner's replicants."
"Is life merely a convenient arrangement of cells or is it necessary to have a "spark of life" or the "soul" to bring bring the cells to "life"?"
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
as long as we don't know how to take care of the non-artificial kind of life I think we should stay the hell away from introducing artificial kinds.
Just think about what *one* lab escaped 'pregnant' self replicating lifeform could do to our ecology. We're doing enough harm as it is, no need to bypass 4 billion years (sorry creationists) of evolution of the predator-prey relationship.
Or would you like your tap to give you 'green scum' instead of water ?
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Does anyone actually argue that grass has a soul? Look up the thalamus, it evolved in vertabrates and is likely where this "spark of consciousness" is.
-I am an elective eunuch.
1. Using a whole population of cells to fine tune the level of control. Source: You et al, "Programmed population control by cell-cell communication and regulated killing", Nature 428, pp868-871.
2. Writing a "compiler" for translating high level instructions (blink on and off at 2 Hz) into biobricks. Source: personal communication with Rodney Brooks.
When are we going to get real interoperable building blocks for software? And I don't mean STL for C++ or CPAN for Perl. I mean building blocks, LEGO-like (or civil-engineering-like) for building software. Anybody up to the task? :)
Additionally, I would consider clones to be synthetic life. Any life arising from the hand of man is de facto synthetic, IMHO.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
Everytime some new advance in bio-tech get's posted the gadget geeks and code pushers get ramped up into a ludite rage against this new evil threat to civilization itself.
Maybe if some of the readers who find themselves espousing the peril of eco-terror that awaits due to "mans ignoble tinkering with what it best left untouched" applied that same feverous perspective at lawmakers who vote for things like the DMCA and Patriot Act, they might find they have something in common.
Popcorn anyone?
...beginning of the end. This is the good first stab at a systematic approach to bio-engineering, which of course can lead to robust theories. The scary part is the potential for 'virus' creation; it's inconceivable that the technology could be sequestered into "good hands" indefinitely.
The evolutionary aspects of this were also intriguing. This will provide material for a substantial test of Bill Dembski's theories about the limitations of evolutionary algorithms. These theories have become important (if true) in several areas, including NIST's attempt to create self-driving cars.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
She might not make much mistakes, but when she does, well, those little mishaps are remembered for a very long time.
Maybe we could use the huge vacuum to clean out the septic tanks and factories?
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Think on them as working as metacatalizers to enable very hard to do for conventional methods chemical products. Or as detectors, not only for TNT as they said there, but also as more trustable than current applications using i.e. animals (dogs to discover drugs). Or as filters, they could assimilate some elements and maybe concentrate them.
Another nice thing about the article is the concept of building blocks. Maybe in a future could, on demand (i.e. an authomatic system), make an specific one to react under certain conditions (i.e. to clean some dangerous contaminator).
In the minus side, working with self-replicating things could be risky. If things goes off control and there is no "shutdown" mechanism (i.e. they die in an environment with O2) the potential for a big disaster could be high
The works of Jules Verne were science fiction, but it didn't take very long for them to be adapted into the real world.
Learn something new.
A silicon (or Ge or GeAs, etc.) lifeform could last much longer, survive higher levels of radiation, operate in harsh environments (space, Mars, etc.).
If we design them to reproduce, our days are numbered.
Look up some population statistics sometime. All the educated nations are already below replacement level (Europe, United States, Australia, China, etc) and after the current parent generation dies out (50 years?) we might see a population crash.
So actually, we need to be having more children (though less developed nations don't have this problem, they do have a problem with AIDS and SARS and other deadly diseases).
GPL Deconstructed
If an organ fails, maybe the question "Does this person still need to live" should be asked.
Very much like the old religious assertion that if someone becomes diseased, "god" has cursed them and they deserve their fate.
If your car has a problem with it's breaks do you say "Does I really need this car?" and chuck it in the river. THINK before you POST man.
I'd hate to see the day when people live to be 180 years old.
I'm sure back when the average human lifespan was 34 years, someone thought the same about living to 100.
I think people really need to 1) stop having children 2) try to accept death a little more.
Sounds like you don't have children and hate people in general. Great combo. =/
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
It seems like a natural progress of artificial life and as such reminds me more about Tierra than Blade Runner's replicants. If you don't know Tierra, there is an interesting description on Wikipedia:
It is very important to remember that given sufficient space and complexity, the difference between carbon-based form of life as we know it and any "artificial" form thereof is only that of a medium. Very interesting read. I hope it will go much further during the next few years and we will see some unimaginable implications of this new idea.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Like Cory Doctorow describes in "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom"?
You might want to take a look at "The Binding of Death" by Culain or the more famous Theodore Sturgeon story on the consequences of ending death. Not a pretty sight ... unless we were able to control our reproductive proclivities, of which the odds range from slim to ... well, Nun.
... and how that differs from that drink from Lethe escapes me ...
I also expect that we'll need a brain-wash every 500 or so years
Agreed, completely. I just wanted to point out to all the people talking about bladerunner, et al. that they were making a *large* jump.
I like bateria. They make nice cheese and champaign. My younger brother works in enviornmental engineering, and hopefully he'll work on some more bacterial models for bioremediation (where this may be useful.)
It's interesting to note that this isn't a new technology. It's more of a catalog of ideas, of things we already knew. It's just put in database form now. And, yes, he isolated some sequence in tubes. But creating long oligonuclotides is getting easier and easier - why not use synthesis to create these short sequence runs?
So, how can you say that downloading someone makes them immortal? Perhaps their copy is semi-immortal.
There are still plenty of ways for the copy to die, even if the process is perfect: insanity, lose of power, deletion (murder or accident), hardware/software failure, bitrot.....
Beware of gifts bearing Greeks.
Here's a quick hack. Note that people can function more or less normally with their corpus callosum severed -- that's the link between the left and right brain. So, cut the callosum, remove one-half of the brain, and replace with a freshly grown half. Sew patient back up, give them a couple months for re-adjustment. Repeat with next half. Voila! Brand-new brain, installed in two parts.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The "new" you.. the copy, might not be aware of this and, since it's experiences are identical to yours (assuming perfect copying practice), it will believe itself to be you, and therefore it will believe that "you" have continued.
:)
But it will a nasty surprise for the original "you".
The only time I would consider such a procedure would be if I were already on the verge of death. In which case it's more of a thought to continuing my work, or passing on some sort of legacy. Either way, my expectation is that I would die. Whatever happened after that would be someone else who looked, thought and acted like me. But it wouldn't be me, and damnit - that sucks
That's not quite accurate... severing the corpus callosum doesn't turn one half of the brain 'off' -- each side is still doing *very* important functions, they just can't communicate directly with one another.
The moment you removed one half, the person would most certainly die. Assuming you could put them on some kind of comprehensive life-support for long enough to let a new half re-integrate, then *perhaps* it would be possible... perhaps.
Althought I suspect memories and personality are quite distributed in the brain, I doubt they are *that* distributed, that losing a complete hemisphere all at once would not result in permanent memory loss.
ERROR 144 - REBOOT ?
I think it was Hans Moravec (?) who gave a theoretical operation that would allow you to move into a new mind (biological or artificial, doesn't matter) while maintaining your sense of personal history/continuity and never experiencing the sensation of 'dying' on either side, original or copy:
Imagine two operating tables with you and new-you. A super-advanced slicing scanner thingie scans each layer of your brain, duplicating its exact state in the new-you's brain as it progresses, and removing each layer from your original brain, while preserving a real-time data link between the just-relocated layer and its old location in your brain.
The process would be slow and continuous enough that your consciousness would probably move imperceptibly from you to new-you... eventually you find yourself perceiving things completely from new-you's body and start to see the old body as the inanimate thing.
ERROR 144 - REBOOT ?
Are you not aware of your own Self, i.e. soul? Your statement can be interpreted as true, as long as you except the fact that what one person can measure... another might not be able to measure.
My introspective awareness of my Self has many consequences for me. However, science requires that what is measured can be measured by everyone, not just by me. So it is absolutely true that I have a soul, I know that for sure... but you can't use science to prove/disprove such a thing. Science can measure the electrical activity of my brain, but there is no way to prove that it corresponds to a Self or soul.
In fact, an experiment might consist of such measurements along with an interview of the subject - asking them what they are thinking/feeling. However, just because someone says that they are aware of their Self or they feel sad... it doesn't prove that such things are true. It only proves that such electrical activity in the brain is associated with such verbal output from the subject.
The distinction might be subtle at first, but it is a huge distinction, with great consequences. One such example is in the field of mathematics, where there is a split between classical math, intuitionistic math, etc...
If you take mathematics to mean intuitionistic mathematics, then I agree that it is one example of something that can be known. However, it rests on the assumption that you are aware or your Self.
1: go to sleep
2: wake up
3: Hey, I've got a new body!
So they're now the same person, but made out of different materials. What's the difference?
[javac] 100 errors
What does this mean? It means that your mind, your awareness, the YOU that's experiencing everything your body does, is information. It's software. It's independent of the underlying hardware.
So, when you make a copy of a software program and run that copy on a different machine, is it still the same program? What if you destroy the original copy - does the program cease to exist? An individual copy can experience death, if it is somehow aware that it is being destroyed, but each copy is merely an instance of the program, which never "dies," as long as copies still exist. I guess what it comes down to is that we are all just instances of ourselves. Which is the real you - the instance, or the information that the instance represents?
[javac] 100 errors
Umm, it wouldn't suck for the "new" you. (S)He would wake up, say, "Hmm, why'd you abort the procedure?" only to find out that it had, in fact, been completed. It would be no different than any other operation. Your stream of conciousness would continue. The fact that the original you's stream of conciousness had ended would make no difference. The new you would be entirely convinced that it was the old you, only improved. If you asked him if it sucked, you'd tell yourself, "No way!" :)