On Sun, 5 Mar 2000, HARNAD, Stevan wrote:
> You already know the answer intuitively: Call it the "Pinch Test": If
> you pinch "evolution," can you hurt it? If not, it's not the kind of
> thing that can have a mind.
yepyep,
ok, different question:
living animals have minds,
genetics code for the creation of an animal from a basis of (albeit
complicated) systems (molecules->amino acids->proteins),
essentially DNA /seems/ (to me) to be a simple symbolic code.
(not that DNA is simple, but that the code is simple)
does that imply that the mind of a given animal is a result of the code.
i.e. DNA forms a complicated computational which results in (through lots
of other stuff) a thing that you would feel bad about hitting..
of course above the level of cells its hard to attribute the cause of the
mind to DNA but in the begining there need only be one cell nucleus.. so
the actual computation is not symbolic but the code is?
owen
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