Crick was a militant atheist, but he had at least a few philosophical feelings about God in his later years. I recall a quote of him talking about how we couldn't explain the origin of life, and cited it as "nothing short of a miracle". What his mixed signals tells me is that at heart he was a scientist, and wasn't prepared to make a biased judgment in either direction whether God did or did not exist - because he likely knew that either of those positions could bias his work. He was an interesting fellow to study, at least. Far more multidimensional than the dry scientists of this age... and I suspect he's answered any of his questions about God by now.
I think his point is the belief that hacked together code is more nonsensical and therefore would be more difficult to reverse engineer. It's like the difference between tracing back ethernet cables in a clean colo facility vs. tracing back cables at something like Mae-East, which (the last time I looked, at least) largely resembled a post-apocalyptic demilitarized zone. At least that's how he seems to view hackers. I personally see hackers as codifying something even more beautiful, logical, and well-articulated than the mundane corporate programmer, delivering a much higher level of intelligence and complexity than most could understand. Either way, you end up with the conclusion that it's a real pain in the ass to hack something that someone smarter than you wrote. Going inline with the quote, if God is a hacker, then you'd expect him to be one of the super geniuses and not some poor yahoo not quite knowing what he was doing.
Apply that to the brain, and we're worlds behind. Considering we're still on the binary system, when DNA uses four base pairs for its instruction code, I think Crick grasped the complexity of the human body much more than Kurzweil seems to. To compare the brain to a computer chip is, I think, a grossly unbalanced parallel.
Slashdot Mirror
Crick was a militant atheist, but he had at least a few philosophical feelings about God in his later years. I recall a quote of him talking about how we couldn't explain the origin of life, and cited it as "nothing short of a miracle". What his mixed signals tells me is that at heart he was a scientist, and wasn't prepared to make a biased judgment in either direction whether God did or did not exist - because he likely knew that either of those positions could bias his work. He was an interesting fellow to study, at least. Far more multidimensional than the dry scientists of this age... and I suspect he's answered any of his questions about God by now.
I have a hard enough time keeping my PS3, Macbook Pro, iPhone, and desktop machine at the latest patch level. Thanks, but no thanks.
I think his point is the belief that hacked together code is more nonsensical and therefore would be more difficult to reverse engineer. It's like the difference between tracing back ethernet cables in a clean colo facility vs. tracing back cables at something like Mae-East, which (the last time I looked, at least) largely resembled a post-apocalyptic demilitarized zone. At least that's how he seems to view hackers. I personally see hackers as codifying something even more beautiful, logical, and well-articulated than the mundane corporate programmer, delivering a much higher level of intelligence and complexity than most could understand. Either way, you end up with the conclusion that it's a real pain in the ass to hack something that someone smarter than you wrote. Going inline with the quote, if God is a hacker, then you'd expect him to be one of the super geniuses and not some poor yahoo not quite knowing what he was doing.
Apply that to the brain, and we're worlds behind. Considering we're still on the binary system, when DNA uses four base pairs for its instruction code, I think Crick grasped the complexity of the human body much more than Kurzweil seems to. To compare the brain to a computer chip is, I think, a grossly unbalanced parallel.