Saturday, May 7, 2011

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] art and science: re-drawing boundaries

So "wet" ware trumps software? Where does this leave the claims made long ago e.g. by Chris Langton or Thomas Ray who observed when he first ran Tierra that "the life force took over". So is the border now redrawn so as to banish permanently John Von Neumann's proposal for self-reproducing automata (and the software lineage) to realm of the virtual and the simulated? But is there a hope of consillience to be found in an unshakable belief (e.g. Wolfram) that computation underlies all that dissolves this binary opposition between the real and simulation?

"I for one welcome our new computer overlords" - Ken Jennings on losing to Watson on Jeopardy, 2/16/2011.

On losing a chess match to Deep Blue...
"Well, at least it didn't enjoy beating me!" - Garry Kasparov

"Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes." - Walt Whitman

"I consider laughter preferable to tears." - John Cage

Gregory P. Garvey, Professor
Director, Game Design Program
Department of Visual and Performing Arts
CAS 1-3122 Mail Drop: CL-AC1
Quinnipiac University
275 Mount Carmel Avenue
Hamden, CT 06518

email: greg.garvey@quinnipiac.edu
________________________________________
From: yasmin_discussions-bounces@estia.media.uoa.gr [yasmin_discussions-bounces@estia.media.uoa.gr] On Behalf Of roger malina [rmalina@alum.mit.edu]
Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2011 4:08 PM
To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS
Subject: [Yasmin_discussions] art and science: re-drawing boundaries

yasminers

no one seems to have picked up on my previous topic\
on the shifting boundary between living and non living
systems

until now the only forms of life on this planete are those
that are derived via darwinian evolution for the primordial
soup as they say

in 2010 a new life form was perhaps created, the first
in 5 billion years

Updated: Oct 18, 2010

http://www.optimalfunctioning.com/science/creation-first-artificial-life-form-synthetic-cell-craig-venter.html#Q&A%20on%20What%20Synthetic%20Life%20Actually%20Means

A brand new living cell and the beginning of an era for artificial
life forms! It's official, J. Craig
Venter and his team have created the first self-replicating synthetic
cell with a completely man-made
set of genetic instructions—a never before existing bacteria species
has joined the ranks of the living.

http://www.optimalfunctioning.com/research/gibson-et-al-2010-creation-of-bacterial-cell-controlled-by-chemically-synthesized-genome.html

The cultural implcations of this new step will no doubt take decades
if not centuries to be integrated
into our deep views on living systems.

Roger

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