For this reading, it covers some things that I am generally interested in like the emergence of properties in complex systems, and parallels between evolution and other seemingly unrelated processes. I liked the author’s use of examples to illustrate his point, like the simple concept of a deer evading prey to explain more complex phenomena of natural selection, and in general, I found that thinking of evolution in computational terms (describing it as a parallel system that has “fault tolerance” and reproduction being described as iteration and recursion) provides a helpful analogy.
From an IM & coding perspective, I think it’s an attractive idea that nature’s patterns are recurring, repeating, and simple, and definitely agree with this in some ways. Testing this idea by trying to mimic or simulate different natural phenomena using a set of small & simple rules sounds really fun and I believe the book as a whole can be very helpful in this regard. I’ve dreamt a lot of trying to make my own version of cellular automata and incorporating an evolutionary network but still keeping it relatively simple, just to see how far I can push it in terms of interesting emergent behaviors that might manifest.
On a slightly more unrelated point, the adaptation section piqued my interest the most, especially the bit about learning, evolution, and cultural adaptation being the same process on different time scales. I’ve watched a couple of lectures from developmental biologist Michael Levin (A really interesting one is Intelligence Beyond the Brain on Youtube), and in it, he proposes this idea that intelligence is more or less the same across different physical scales and that all intelligence is collective intelligence (since everything is made of parts). He talks about the similarities between types of intelligences that we often think of as vastly different or even completely overlook. Like how cells came together as separate individual intelligent agents and gave rise to multicellular intelligence able to solve more complex problems (emergence), and then how these multicellular intelligences can be organs (that can themselves be considered intelligent) that come together to make organisms that are able to solve & work towards more even complex goals (although at the most basic level, they seem to me more or less the same goals of reproduction, food prosperity, etc.. just on larger scales). Sometimes I like to theorise that any group of intelligent agents is eventually bound to come together and give rise to something more complex, and I think that humans are just going through their evolutional journey of figuring out how to connect, communicate and work together seamlessly (almost like cells do), to give rise to an agent that’s on a different plane of intelligence, capable of much more than we are able to imagine. I think we would need a real technological revolution in communication, but sometimes I feel like it’s almost inevitable. In the lecture I mentioned earlier Michael Levin points out how cells don’t know that they are part of a human they’re just doing their thing, and I think that even if they had some sort of awareness that they are part of a system or working within a larger group, the problems and aspects of human life are simply incomprehensible to a single cell because they exist on a different scale. So, maybe we already are part of an intelligent agent and we just don’t know it, an agent that exists in a realm beyond our comprehension or understanding.
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