XPost: alt.philosophy, alt.atheism, talk.atheism
From: Reanimater_2000@yahoo.com

"ralph"  wrote in message
news:AY2fG0BxBGGEFwai@eddlewood.demon.co.uk...
> In message , Immortalist
>  writes
>
>>I believe that probability or "randomness" is a psychic instinct or
>>Jungian archetype or mental trend that helps us organize our perceptions
>>and memories and most of all our expectations
>
> And do you think a pollen grain following Brownian movement shares this
> psychic instinct?
>

Because most mathematical discussions of algorithms focus on their
guaranteed or mathematically provable powers, people sometimes make the
elementary mistake of thinking that a process that makes use of chance for
randomness is not an algorithm. But even long division makes good use of
randomness

326574 ÷ 47 = 7?

Does the divisor go into the dividend six or seven times? Who knows? Who
cares? You don't have to know; youu don't have any wit or descernment to do
long division. The algorithm directs you just to choose a digit--at random,
if you like--and check out the result. If the chosen number turns out to be
too small, increase it by one and start over; if too large, decrease it. the
good thing about long division is that it always works eventually, even if
you are maximally stupid in making your first choice, in which case it just
takes a little longer. Achieving success on hard tasks in spite of utter
stupidity is what makes computers seem magical--how could something as
mindless as a machine do something as smart as that? Not surprisingly, then,
the tactic of finessing ignorance by randomly generating a candidate and
then testing it out mechanically is a ubiquitous feature of interesting
algorithms. Not only does it not interfere with their provable powers as
algorithms, it is often the key to their power.

When looking at an E-Coli bacterium swimming around, it is easier to see how
randomness can buy food.

Organisms are problem sovers seeking better conditiions -- even the lowest
organism performs trial and error mearsurements with a distinct aim. This
image brought to mind Berg's striking film of chemotaxic bacteria. He showed
how:

A bacterium's flagellar motor makes it run and tumble randomly until the
bacterium senses a gradient of nutrient. The bacterium then reduces the
frequency of tumbling and lengthens the runs towards a greater concentration
of nutrient.

The random element is the tumbling: the new direction of swimming bears
little relationship to the previous path before the tumble. And so the
cell's path is a random walk unless something else happens. And the
something else is simply suppressing the tumbling: When finding mare and
more food, the bacterium swims longer on its current straight path. This
enables it to home in on the food source, perhaps a decaying morsal whose
organic molecules are diffusing away into the water near the bottom of the
pond (remember what a sugar cube looks like when disolving in the bottom of
a cup, how the sugar gradually spreads out).

Now most philosophers looking through a magnifying glass at that food
finding path would have ascribed intelligence to that purposeful performance
of the little bacterium.

At such a marginal magnification, it would seem to home in on the morsal.
But the bacterium has no brain: It's just a single cell with some inherited
simple abilities such as swimming, tumbling, and sensing increasing yield.

One the Most basic form of multicellular creatures, consisting only of
SOCIALIZING CELLS sensing each other. Advanced organisms such as the one
reading these words comprise many billions of cells that are organized into
enormously elaborate structures during the process of development from egg
to offspring. Nonlinear mathematics can provide a qualitative sketch of the
self organization of a community of cells, as we can illustrate with the
help of a strange creature called slime mold.

The slime mold lies halfway between a collection of single cells and an
organism. Like the ant hive Dictyostelium discoideum is a superorganism. At
times it is multicellular (with around 100,00 cells), while at others, its
cells wander independently. When the bacteria that make up its food are
plentiful, individual cells feed voraciously, behaving like solitary
wanderers and multiplying by direct cell division.

Eventually, however, the colony runs short of food. Now the cells "notice"
each other. For nonlinear reasons not yet fully understood, certain cells in
the colony become active and act as pacemakers, "ringleaders" that send out
rhythmic pulses of a chemical called cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP).
This is a ubiquitous molecule in biology that acts as a molecular message
between neighboring cells. It is a glucose distress signal, announcing they
have run out of food.

This clarion call to close ranks and organize travels at a few microns a
second. Cells amplify and pass on the message, a form of feedback mechanism
providing the nonlinearity that induces still more cells to hone in on the
pacemaker centers.

There are two additional ingredients:

Once a cell has released a burst of cAMP it cannot immediately respond to
another signal, going into a "refractory state" before returning to an
excitable condition.

The cells also exude another enzyme -- phosphodiesterase -- that destroys
cAMP, setting up a gradient of the chemical that provides a signpost.

The starving cells slither toward the pacemaker cells, in the direction of
increasing cAMP concentration. Aggregating populations can produce
concentric and spiral waves that bear a compelling resemblance to the spiral
waves occurring in the BZ reaction. This is no surprise: though the details,
the positive and negative feedback processes are the same.

Once the cells have formed a slimy mass, they begin to differentiate and a
tip forms that secretes cAMP continuously. The whole mass becomes organized
into a glistening multicellular "slug," with a head and a tail, that
wriggles in search of light and water.

All in all, it takes several hours for these cells to form this simple
organism. Between one and two millimeters long, it crawls along under the
leadership of the pulsating source at its tip. It then rights itself to form
a hard stalk above which perches a small head containing spores; eventually,
the head breaks open and the wind casts its spores far and wide. If they
settle in a suitable place, they can germinate and begin the cycle of this
strange organism's life anew.

Since the early part of the century it has been known that the pattern of
organization of a living system is always a network pattern. However, we
also know that not all networks are living systems. According to Maturana

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