Chunks of infinity
Okay, so, presuming that DNA can be represented in binary form – not something I’d care to lay money on, it may be one of those problems like vinyl vs. CDs…
Oh dear.
It is completely impossible to represent the output of a analog instrument accurately as a digital signal, of *any* precision. 16 bits, 24 bits, 32 bits, 64 bits, 44khz, 96khz, go as far as you like, you still won’t have actually captured the instrument. Of course, the difference between what you captured and what is actually there is so infintestimally small that only very sensitive equipment can pick it up – and certainly small enough that no human ear can hear it. But it is there. DNA may express accurately as a digital signal, or it may not. We haven’t yet had the technology – as far as I know – to write a DNA sequence into a computer and then somehow bring it back out and create a lifeform based on it. I’d appriciate it if that’s not true if someone would point it out to me – but as far as I know ‘gene splicing’ is a mechanical thing thus far.
Anyway.. presuming that it can be, both me and any virii I may catch (copy data out of) are just very, very large numbers. I know that I’ve been going on about this for a while and I will probably continue to go on about it for a while, although I’m sure that sooner or later I’ll give it up in favor of musing about something else that’s completely irrelevant to anything.
That said, why is it that I am a self-aware life form protected by human law and my virii are not? For that matter, why is it that if a bear kills a man, the bear is free to go, whereas if I kill a man, I’m jailed for 20 years? (Not that I consider killing someone a moral activity, or that I would do such a thing [I hope]).
Does anyone *know* that AIDS isn’t sentient? We may not be *aware* of the sensory data that it is receiving, much in the same way that it probably isn’t aware of the sensory data we’re receiving. It may be blissfully unaware of killing us just as we are blissfully unaware of killing thousands of virii and bacteria a day.
For that matter, we don’t know if its self-aware. We’re not even all that clear on what self-aware means. I remember going to the aquarium with my sister and watching a fish, and having it swivil it’s eyes around – and I swear it was watching me. Fish don’t have much in the way of memory, supposedly – except that a salmon can swim back to the river which it was born in years after its birth. Perhaps we’re not seeing the whole picture..
I feel guilty about eating fish. I don’t eat cow, but lately I’ve been craving cow and feeling guilty about wanting to eat cow. And I wonder if cow would feel guilty about eating me – they do seem to be vegetarian.
August 4th, 2006 at 9:41 pm
cows are confirmed vegetarians. just grass, really. stockyards feed them grain because it’s cheaper and easier, but it totally fucks up their digestion and they have to shove their assholes back into them when they pop out. yeah, it’s gross. but if cows were carnivores, you can bet your bottom dollar they would have zero guilt issues about eating you.
as for self-awareness, yep, we still don’t know what that means. it’s like pornography, you know it when you see it. er, experience it. it’s one of those problems that modern science, in all its vaunted glory, has relegated to non-issue status. which means they don’t even know how to begin thinking about the problem. i, personally, liked the behaviorists’ approach to it the best: they were, all of them, quite sure that we simply don’t have subjective experiences; that consciousness, and by extension self-awareness, doesn’t really exist. that just tickles the shit out of me.
August 5th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
A: I’m not saying it’s reasonable to try and achieve this, but analog signals aren’t analog. At some point you either have an electron flowing or you don’t. We’re getting near that point, actually, in some types of instrumentation: you can buy pico-ammeters for comparatively reasonable prices. So at some point, if you were sampling at a rate higher than individual electrons are flowing, you could digitally represent the analog signal losslessly.
B: what’s sentient? AIDS is an amplifier. Humans are amplifiers. We have a sense of self-awareness and time; it’s not clear that AIDS does, but I’m not entirely sure that it’s relevant. To AIDS we’re a biosphere, like the Earth is to us.
C: now the bear thing is really interesting because it ties into a huge number of current moral issues. I think the underlying issue here is whether a crime is one of action or intent. Both have problems. If you are carrying a machine gun into a school yard, is it reasonable to arrest you on suspicion, or do police have to wait until you pull the trigger? A bear is supposedly not aware of morality, so its actions are not criminal (although in most places, killer animals are killed.) So, for instance, I posted a while back about a recent study that indicated use of the rhythm method kills more embryos than contraceptives do. That hides the underlying issue of motivation: using the rhythm method does not intend to destroy (possibly) viable embryos, while contraception is an intentional act to prevent pregnancy. It’s the intention that’s the offense, not the act.
November 12th, 2007 at 10:55 am
Couldn’t you represent an analog signal in digital by converting it to *equations* that have infinite precision?
Like (terrible example warning) “Yes, sample #23904230948 is 2039482093843 and sample #290348023984 is 209348029384, but between them, the line travels in f(x)=x^y+z blahblah”. Then you could subsample a digitallyencoded signal to whatever precision you want.
Is this crazy?