Hrvoje's blog

Participating in a messy discussion at scienceforums.net as Hrvoje1, I couldn't help the feeling that the legitimate question of mathematical description of design still eludes scientific community, as well as that of mathematical description of life. Regardless of the question if these two are connected, I have searched a bit for the information on who tackled it so far, and of course found tons of material, some is seminal such as Schrödinger's What is Life? , in a sense that he was among the first physicists to deal with it in a longer essay, and Constructor Theory of Life by Marletto, in a sense that she and Deutsch went further than anyone else in their investigation, that I already knew, however there is also Chris Adami, Fritjof Capra, ... and many others. There is also Elsberry and Shallit versus Dembski discussion/critique Information Theory, Evolutionary Computation, and Dembski's Complex Specified Information , that I didn't study very careful...

There are three important strange loops that I encountered, after I realized people are contemplating such a term, proposed and extensively discussed by Douglas Hofstadter in his books. Self-referential system is the essence of a strange loop of consciousness, see Liar, Epimenides, Barber, Russell's and Quine’s paradoxes, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, Miranker & Zuckerman theory about consciousness. Chicken or the egg dilemma is a strange loop of evolution. It can be resolved by saying that the egg evolved much earlier than the chicken, although, that egg was not the same kind of egg that appears in the dilemma, ie the one that is laid by chickens and the one chickens hatch from. But still, it's a kind of resolution, provided that we will understand one day the exact mechanism of evolution of multicellular organisms. DNA or enzymes (involved in protein synthesis and folding and in DNA replication) dilemma, and the information ...

It is a pedestrian observation that people appreciate criticism much more if it is not directed towards something they relate to. In my last essay, I concluded that replicator<-->vehicle is actually very limited paradigm, and received an answer from Mr.Deutsch that ended with conclusion: "Hence the unavoidability of the von Neumann replicator-vehicle mechanism and the futility of attributing evolution to the vehicle." That mechanism may be mathematically provable necessity to describe accurate self-reproducer, but it also may be totally agnostic with respect to mechanism that causes the inaccuracies, ie which drives evolution. Or is it also mathematically/logically provable that inaccuracy in self reproduction must be random in its nature? Is it prescribed by this model what causes variation, or is it open for some other model to give an answer to that question? In fact, already the choice of the term variation vs inaccuracy has different connotations and implies or s...

I was interested in what other leaders of the third way of evolution are doing, so I read one very interesting interview with Denis Noble, made by Suzan Mazur, link to which I found on thethirdwayofevolution.com:   Replace the Modern Synthesis (Neo-Darwinism): An Interview With Denis Noble What first struck my attention was the mentioned work of Yong-Hua Sun and his colleagues: >>What Yong Hua Sun et al. did was take the nucleus of one species of fish and insert it into the denucleated but fertilized egg cell of a different species. What they got as an adult — it’s very rare that you get an adult from such a cross-species clone — but what they got as an adult is intermediate between the two, whereas, of course, in a gene-centric view you should — and assuming the genes are defined as DNA — you should get the animal from which the nucleus was taken. That doesn’t happen in Yong Hua Sun’s experiment.<< There were several intriguing (to me at least) questi...

What relation do you find between these two things? Besides the fact that thermal processing destroys some valuable heat labile ingredients, and produces others, potentially cancerogenous ones, although more by baking, frying and roasting and less by cooking, there are positive effects of that activity, primarily killing of potentially dangerous microorganisms, which makes the mentioned connection. Things are, however, not that simple, since there are other reasons why people started to do that, at certain point in time of human evolutionary development, for example because food becomes more digestible that way, however the main comparative advantage is in fact disinfection, ie sterilization. On the other hand, scientists present other reasons for raised temperature during infection, other than creating unbearable living conditions for microbes, which can be read here: http://science.howstuffworks. com/life/cellular-microscopic/ question45.htm https://www.sciencedaily....

Besides information and an intelligent agent, the third fundamental notion in a theory that describes intelligent behaviour is a game. <wikipediaQuote>Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interaction between rational decision-makers. It has applications in all fields of social science, as well as in logic and computer science. Originally, it addressed zero-sum games, in which one person's gains result in losses for the other participants. Today, game theory applies to a wide range of behavioral relations, and is now an umbrella term for the science of logical decision making in humans, animals, and computers. Modern game theory began with the idea regarding the existence of mixed-strategy equilibria in two-person zero-sum games and its proof by John von Neumann. The games studied in game theory are well-defined mathematical objects. To be fully defined, a game must specify the following elements: the players of the game, the information and actions a...

In my previous blog , there were some issues that I want to address here. I edited it in order to correct some grammatical errors, hopefully making it more readable that way. For example, I wasn't aware of the fact that "information" is uncountable noun in English, unlike in Croatian, in which the word "informacija" has singular and plural form, since it means a piece of information, or a bit of information. Worse than that, I realized that I didn't properly mention authors of all papers that I referenced, so I corrected that, and I apologize for that too. I noticed also some logical errors, that I left as they are, but I will comment on them here. When I said there that we identify cell with proteins (although, a cell is much, much more complex object than any of its protein parts, and its behaviour is probably not reducible to their behaviour), because these molecules are its most active part, I didn't emphasize enough that poin...