Creation
"Working mostly alone, almost singlehandedly writing 250,000 lines of computer code, Steve Grand produced Creatures, a revolutionary computer game that allowed players to create living beings complete with brains, genes, and hormonal systems - creatures that would live and breathe and breed in real time on an ordinary desktop computer. Enormously successful, the game inevitably raises the question: What is artificial life? And in this book - a chance for the devoted fan and the simply curious onlookers to see the world from the perspective of an original philosopher-engineer and intellectual maverick - Steve Grand proposes an answer.". "From the composition of the brains and bodies of artificial life forms to the philosophical guidelines and computational frameworks that define them, Creation plumbs the practical, social, and ethical aspects and implications of the state of the art. But more than that, the book gives readers access to the insights Grand acquired in writing Creatures - insights that yield a view of the world that is surprisingly antireductionist, antimaterialist, and (to a degree) antimechanistic, a view that sees matter, life, mind, and society as simply different levels of the same thing. Such a hierarchy, Grand suggests, can be mirrored by an equivalent one that exists inside a parallel universe called cyberspace."--BOOK JACKET.
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- It sounds like you've maybe read Steve Grand's book, Creation: Life and How To make It?
That is his entire pitch; if you've not read it I wholly recommend it.
- The book called Creation by Steve Grand has great arguments in favor of the analogie. I came across it as the favorite book of Jeff Bezos.
Sorry, I know this is a weak response to your argument but it would be too much to cover here, I don't have the time and I'm not sure I should convince anybody anyway. If you want to shake your beliefs on what life and intelligence are, go read the book.
- There is a great book written 20 years ago by Steve Grand called "Creation: Life and how to make it"[1] it basically uses the game Creatures[2] as the testing environment for creating Artificial Life. There are some great thoughts in that book also about how science needs more cross disciplinary experts to connect the dot's between insights in one field and apply it to others.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Creation-Life-Make-Steve-Grand/dp/067...
- - David Marr: "Vision"
The foundations of computational neroscience - and lots of practial demonstrations of how your eyes and brain work.
- Daniel Dennett "Consciousness Explained"
How the mind works?
- J.E Gordon: "The new Science of Strog Materials" & " Structures, or why things don't fall down."
How is 'stuff' strong/hard?
- Steve Grand: "Creation" & "Growing up with Lucy"
The programmer behind the game 'Creatures' and his adventures in artificial life.
- Joseph Campbell: "The Hero with a Thousand Faces"
Never look at Star Wars in the same way again.
- David Deutch: "The Fabric of Reality"
Many worlds or mad as a box of frogs?
- Richard Leakey & Roger Lewin: "The Sixth Extinction"
We're doomed - maybe
- Braitenberg: "Vehicles"
Emergent behaviour from simple rules
- Ian Wilmut, Keith Cambell & Colin Tudge: "The Second Creation"
How Dolly the Sheep was made. Takes you through the background such that you can read & understand their paper which appears at the end.
- John Brunner: "The Shockwaver Rider"
Snowcrash - hah! - 1975 and this dude got it already.
Other general authors:
Martin Gardner, Greg Egan (lots of free stuff on his site).
- It's not quite getting that far.
Steve Grand (the guy who wrote the Creatures video game) wrote a book, Creation: life and how to make it about this (famously instead of a PhD thesis, at Richard Dawkins' suggestion):
https://archive.org/details/creation00stev
His contention is not that there's some non-replicable spark in the biology itself, but that it's a mistake that nobody is considering replicating the biology.
That is to say, he doesn't think intelligence can evolve separately to some sense of "living", which he demonstrates by creating simple artificial biology and biological drives.
It often makes me wonder if the problem with training LLMs is that at no point do they care they are alive; at no point are they optimising their own knowledge for their own needs. They have only the most general drive of all neural network systems: to produce satisfactory output.
- IIRC It’s Steve Grand’s contention in Creation: Life And How To Make It that we will only get artificial consciousness with artificial biological drives.
