Newsgroups: comp.ai.alife
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!minsky
From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Is this example alive?
Message-ID: <1994Sep15.193954.17708@news.media.mit.edu>
Sender: news@news.media.mit.edu (USENET News System)
Cc: minsky
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
References: <940909.070611.4285@cheshire.cc.oxy.edu> <350lmq$b5l@harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au> <NICKB.94Sep15121319@abel.harlqn.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 1994 19:39:54 GMT
Lines: 21

Surely you have all recognized that this new group is dying because of
the stupid obsession with defining "alive".  Words should be our
servants, not our masters. It is no accident that biologists do not
discuss such definitions.  There are lots of books with titles like
"the biology of living things" but you won't find the word 'living'
inside them. Perhaps the problem is that this group needs at least one
serious problem to discuss.  How about this:

The standard models of genetic evolution do not provide ways for

1. inheriting acquired characteristics 
2. evolving "purposeful" mechanisms within the genome.

How would you redesign the genome to make these feasible.  Don't get
tangled into defining "purposeful".  Why not use the Newell-Simon idea
of a system that has a representation of a goal, plus a mechanism to
reduce the differences between what you have and what the goal
describes.



