..without an intellect to assign a value?
In the sense that a pile is sand is “Turing Complete”, and therefore capable of any computation, I’d say it came that way, or perhaps the question is meaningless?
There is so little premise here that it barely qualifies as a topic. Maybe you can elaborate more on what you really mean?
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Define: Data processing scheme.
Sounds like CS Lewis’s “milk jug” analogy? Using updated vocabulary doesn’t make a dumb argument any less dumb.
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So your answer is, “It could not have”?
I’d say that in an early prokaryote, as soon as a protein’s synthesis acquires a regulatory sequence that can increase its synthesis, that is a simple “data processing scheme”. Other kinds of protein interactions can start that process too. Whether one wants to have that kind of regulation is of course just a matter of what fitness results.
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Yeah but your example requires representation and a decoder. @Dan_Eastwood will argue that computation does not require these things. So he’s sorta got you beat to the punch.
Oh dear! I had not previously come across that analogy. And here was me thinking that my opinion of CS Lewis could not get any lower.
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I don’t see that my example requires “representation” and “a decoder”. If Dan Eastwood were to say that it didn’t require those, I would agree. You must mean some much more complex system, and you have not made that clear. Not just an organism having a response to an environment.
I don’t want to do anything to make it easier for biologists to come and muck things up with their crazy metaphors
He would say that, though he hasn’t actually stated yet whether or not he really believes that in a universe sans intellect, piles of sand would melt and purify into silicone and arrange into CPUs. But there are actually more simple examples one could give and then posit that they would process 1 bit of information. But if “Piles of sand are [maybe?] Turing complete” ends up being the official position of the Peaceful Science forum, then perhaps that is as it should be..
So you don’t think that evolving a response to an environmental cue qualifies as an early step in a “data processing scheme”? Or you do? A little clarification would help, though I realize that you don’t want to.
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Sure, but this only leads to disagreements over whether or not there is representation and decoding involved in this scheme. @Dan_Eastwood seems like he’s trying to suggest we start with something more fundamental, pure computation. Something which we know exists outside of biology. But his piles of sand melting and arranging into CPUs thing is a bit weird and he doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, I guess.
But we can think of something much more simple; We can imagine a system of warm and cool air convection in the universe, existing before minds and intellect. Such a system wouldn’t actually be performing computation but it’s a good example because there is no representation involved in this scheme.
Dan would say this system processes 1 bit of data.
I would say Dan is incoherent.
Who would you agree with?