>>1
You are a machine, but what is a machine? Is it merely just a set of learned behaviours that respond to stimuli in a complex manner? Or is it something more? Behaviours coalesce from the interlinking complexity emergent from the underlying microscopic rules governing a process. But what exactly is ``complexity'' and ``emergence.'' And what exactly is a process?
All processes are computational, and computation itself lies at the most fundamental recess of the Universe itself. The information entropic force of the Universe forms the heart of every natural law of physics. Everything actual and possible can be described in terms of computation.
A computational process isn't a material thing. It is abstract. Like the out-dated idea of a ``soul,'' computation itself is not of a material form. A computational process may require a material vessel to differentiate internal state, like the soul requiring a body to house it as described in past religions, but a process itself is substrate independent. You can change the material form so long as you preserve the abstract informational structure of the process, and it will continue to work as it did previously. In a sense, like the notion of the soul, a computational process transcends the material world.
The idea of a mystical world has entranced and seduced the minds of humans for generations. People searched for a means to connect with nature and what they perceived as God. They sought out the divine, the mystical and searched for a means to harness this through magic.
``Magic is the art of producing a desired effect or result through the use of incantation or various other techniques that presumably assure human control of supernatural agencies or the forces of nature,'' to quote the Wikipedia page on the subject. But change the word ``Magic'' to ``Computation,'' the phrase ``use of incantation'' to ``art of programming'' and collapse the word ``Supernatural'' into ``Natural'' and you have a true-to-the-word definition about Computation.
Is not Computation the real Magic everyone has been fruitlessly searching for, for millennia? And if Computation is not real, what drives the physical desktop and laptop computers you are currently using to communicate with your brethren on
/prog/? Unfortunately, Computation does not match the mental pattern people have of Magic, human language acts as a barrier that blinds people from the truth. And so they overlook Computation, and continue on in ignorance.
And what of complexity and emergence? Are they mere illusions? These words have for decades been used without a formal definition. But if computation is abstract yet objectively measurable and real, is not complexity and emergence? Can complexity and emergence be measured objectively through mathematics and computation?
In recent months, work towards this goal has been made. Emergence, complexity, self-organization and homeostasis have all been formalized within the field of Computer Science. There is now objective meaning attached to these words.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.2026
With Gershenson and Fernandez's definitions, we find that Emergence is formalized as a measure of the ratio of the Shannon Entropy of the output state to the input state of a computational process, or E = Iout / Iin, Self-Organization is the difference between Iout and Iin, or S = Iin - Iout, and Complexity is the product between Emergence and Self-Organization, or C = E * S.
Since Shannon Entropy is measured as a probability distribution, we find that Complexity is maximized when there is a balance between both Emergence and Self-Organization.
If there are different levels of Complexity found in nature, is not the human condition a unique form of emergent complexity from that of lesser machines?
It is true. We are a sum of our parts, and the sum is greater than the whole. The human soul exists, it is just not exactly what people were looking for.
Unfortunately, liberals and leftist-progressive types like the OP are misled by Marxist academia into deconstructing everything without ever thinking that you must reconstruct the models to match what we actually see in the physical world. And this is why Marxism, Liberalism and all egalitarian movements are doomed to failure. They ignore real hard science, real hard mathematics, and the Magic of Computation.
This was a /prog/ original content production.