“Are these viruses a part of us? They definitely are.” - David Haig
Retroviruses reach the host’s genome to be copied and passed on to daughter cells for the life of the host. Endogenous retroviruses (ERV) effect the sperm or egg cell, passing onto every cell in subsequent generations. ERV might enter a symbiotic relationship with the host when their mutations contribute adaptive functions.
Retroviruses mechanism of action is to enter a cell, use the enzyme reverse transcriptase to turn its RNA into DNA, enter the nucleus and inserts its DNA into the genome. If the cell it infects is a sperm or egg cell, it will become endogenous and pass down to descendants.
30% of all protein adaptations since humans’ divergence with chimpanzees have been driven by viruses. Adaptations occur three times as frequently in virus-interacting proteins compared with other proteins. such as why closely-related species have evolved different machinery to perform identical cellular functions, like DNA replication or the production of membranes.
Viruses are a dominant driver of protein adaptation in mammals: https://elifesciences.org/articles/12469
Syncytin is a captive retroviral envelope protein involved in human placental morphogenesis: https://www.nature.com/articles/35001608 Retroviruses push the envelope for mammalian placentation: https://www.pnas.org/content/109/7/2184.long Intrinsic retroviral reactivation in human preimplantation embryos and pluripotent cells: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4503379/ The primate-specific noncoding RNA HPAT5 regulates pluripotency during human preimplantation development and nuclear reprogramming: https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3449 Dynamic transcription of distinct classes of endogenous retroviral elements marks specific populations of early human embryonic cells.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25658370
Overview: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/endogenous-retroviruses/
Lynn Margulis. cells contained symbiotic bacteria known as mitochondria and chloroplasts, which earned room and board by either supplying energy or producing food from sunlight
see: numerology, cybershamanism
see: cybershamanismThe art of realizing meaningful coincidences in the seemingly mundane with mystical or esoteric significance; a form of postmodern animism. see: chaos magick, synchronicity
Events with no causal relationship yet are meaningfully related. Alias: acausal parallelism. See: chaos magick, sychnromysticism
complex adaptive system is a system in which a perfect understanding of the individual parts does not automatically convey a perfect understanding of the whole system’s behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system
An entity having properties it does not have due to the interactions among its parts. Emergent behavior
The principle that in open systems a given end state can be reached by many potential means. See: consilience, self-organization ### Excitable medium An excitable medium is a nonlinear dynamical system which has the capacity to propagate a wave of some description, and which cannot support the passing of another wave until a certain amount of time has passed (known as the refractory time).
A forest is an example of an excitable medium: if a wildfire burns through the forest, no fire can return to a burnt spot until the vegetation has gone through its refractory period and regrown.
Events which take place at critical values of some parameter, switching a physical system from one state to another.
See: self-organizationhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics re: heuristics, heuristic science
The Fredkin finite nature hypothesis states that ultimately all quantities of physics, including space and time, are discrete and finite. All measurable physical quantities arise from some Planck scale substrate for information processing. Also, the amount of information in any small volume of spacetime will be finite and equal to a small number of possibilities. https://web.archive.org/web/20130829040406/http://64.78.31.152/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/finite_nature.pdf
So what is reality, one more time? An incompressible compuation by a fractal CA of inconceivable dimensions. And where is this huge computation taking place? Everywhere; it’s what we’re made of. - Rudy Rucker: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality
Stephen Wolfram. In Chapter 9 of A New Kind of Science,[3] Stephen Wolfram presents an outline of a multiverse automaton. Below the Planck scale, there is an informational substrate that allows the build-up of time, space, and energy by means of an updating parameter. The updating parameter for the multiverse is analogous to time via a mathematical isomorphism, but the updating parameter involves a decomposition across alternate universes. The informational substrate consists of network nodes that can simulate random network models and Feynman path integrals. In physical reality, both energy and spacetime are secondary features. The most fundamental feature of reality is signal propagation caused by an updating parameter acting upon network nodes. The multiverse automaton has a model consisting of informational substrate, an updating parameter, a few simple rules, and a method for deriving all of quantum field theory and general relativity theory, The totally finite nature of the model implies the existence of weird, alternate-universe forces that might, or might not, be too small for empirical detection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megastructure#Theoretical
A matrioshka brain[1] is a hypothetical megastructure proposed by Robert Bradbury, based on the Dyson sphere, of immense computational capacity. It is an example of a Class B stellar engine, employing the entire energy output of a star to drive computer systems.[2] This concept derives its name from the nesting Russian Matryoshka dolls.[3]
Claytronics is an abstract future concept that combines nanoscale robotics and computer science to create individual nanometer-scale computers called claytronic atoms, or catoms, which can interact with each other to form tangible 3D objects that a user can interact with.
In continental philosophy, that which constructs a new real, rather than representing one. Alias: diagrammatic machine.
‘The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality… the abstract machine connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field… the map of relations between forces, a map of destiny, or intensity, which…acts as a non-unifying immanent cause which is coextensive with the whole social field. The abstract machine is like the cause of the concrete assemblages that execute its relations; and these relations take place ‘not above’ but within the very tissue of the assemblages they produce’
Gödelian arguments claim that a system of human mathematicians (or some idealization of human mathematicians) is both consistent and powerful enough to recognize its own consistency. Since this is impossible for a Turing machine, the Gödelian concludes that human reasoning must be non-mechanical.
However, the modern consensus in the scientific and mathematical community is that actual human reasoning is inconsistent; that any consistent “idealized version” H of human reasoning would logically be forced to adopt a healthy but counter-intuitive open-minded skepticism about the consistency of H (otherwise H is provably inconsistent); and that Gödel’s theorems do not lead to any valid argument against mechanism.[3][4][5] This consensus that Gödelian anti-mechanist arguments are doomed to failure is laid out strongly in Artificial Intelligence: “any attempt to utilize (Gödel’s incompleteness results) to attack the computationalist thesis is bound to be illegitimate, since these results are quite consistent with the computationalist thesis.”"
Gödel uses the incompleteness theorem to arrive at the following disjunction: (a) the human mind is not a consistent finite machine, or (b) there exist Diophantine equations for which it cannot decide whether solutions exist. Gödel finds (b) implausible, and thus seems to have believed the human mind was not equivalent to a finite machine, i.e., its power exceeded that of any finite machine. He recognized that this was only a conjecture, since one could never disprove (b). Yet he considered the disjunctive conclusion to be a “certain fact”.
Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge is a 1975 book about the philosophy of science by Paul Feyerabend, in which the author argues that science is an anarchic enterprise, not a nomic (customary) one.[1] In the context of this work, the term anarchy refers to epistemological anarchy.
Set of “standardized face ingredients”, derived from statistical analysis of many pictures of faces. Any human face can be considered to be a combination of these standard faces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroheuristics
A community of synergistically interacting organisms, or individuals, of different species, or backgrounds. See: supraorganism, synergy
Spontaneous, complex order arising within disordered systems of strong dynamical non-linearity reaching a stable state to efficiently eliminate equilibrium in the system. See: attractor, daemon, decentralization, emergence, synergy.
A group of synergistically interacting organisms of the same species. Alias: extended organism. See: synergy, holobiont
Emergent intelligent behavior of a decentralized, self-organized system made up of agents with no centralized control structure dictating behavior unknown to the individual agents. See: emergence, self-organization, supraorganism
The Omega Point is a term Tipler uses to describe a cosmological state in the distant proper-time future of the universe that he maintains is required by the known physical laws. According to this cosmology, it is required for the known laws of physics to be mutually consistent that intelligent life take over all matter in the universe and eventually force its collapse. During that collapse, the computational capacity of the universe diverges to infinity and environments emulated with that computational capacity last for an infinite duration as the universe attains a solitary-point cosmological singularity. This singularity is Tipler’s Omega Point.[6] With computational resources diverging to infinity, Tipler states that a society far in the future would be able to resurrect the dead by emulating all alternative universes of our universe from its start at the Big Bang.[7] Tipler identifies the Omega Point with God, since, in his view, the Omega Point has all the properties of God, claimed by most of the traditional religions Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, will never die out.[10]
The strong anthropic principle (SAP), as explained by John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler, states that this is all the case because the universe is in some sense compelled to eventually have conscious and sapient life emerge within it. Some critics of the SAP argue in favor of a weak anthropic principle (WAP) similar to the one defined by Brandon Carter, which states that the universe’s ostensible fine tuning is the result of selection bias (specifically survivor bias): i.e., only in a universe capable of eventually supporting life will there be living beings capable of observing and reflecting on the matter
Quantum entanglement: a phenomenon in quantum mechanics where the states of two particles are locked together, even across a distance.
http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/digitalphysics.html