Spaghetti code has more negative connotation than I’d attribute to our insanely adaptive, flexible, and efficient organism.
The more complex a species, the less adaptivity it has to fundamental shifts in environmental pressures. The interconnections between protein functions are directly responsible for that trade-off, and become a liability.
The time scales for evolution far beyond our current level of genetic complexity, probably extend beyond the life span of the Earth.
Now the benefit of this speghetti-code situation is that no intelligent designer is required - obviously a fundamental ingredient of abiogenesis, but does it benefit an species that's capable of genetic editing?
Nope. At this point, it's really just a bottleneck to even repairing the most straight-forward genetic diseases.
As a species, we're approaching the time where we've obviated evolution. ...I won't say we've seen that yet because reproduction rates are still very uneven across population segments, but it's only a matter of a few more generations (cataclysms not withstanding).
Not sure how you’re defining complex but humans pretty soundly refute that adaptability thing.
It’s not a “bottleneck” it’s just... life. Can you point to an animal anywhere near as successful as humans that doesn’t have.. genetic variability? No. It’s a requirement and precondition for our success, not some flaw we overcame despite.
What's my private key? It's a mystery, but not a very interesting one.
Why does the universe exist? It's mysterious, maybe the most mysterious thing of all, and 8lit's interesting, but I'd say it's not the most interesting question of them all.
i mean to convey: something that is difficult or impossible to explain. something that is deeply interesting and provokes wonderment.
what is more difficult to explain and understand than the fundamental nature of existence?
perhaps it is not apparently immediately _useful_.
but in a cosmic sense, of what use is it to understand thought objects in the world when there is a complete lack of understanding of the consciousness in which these thought objects arise?
i’m curious what are some candidates for “most interesting question of them all” in your view. this is something which sparks a genuine curiosity in me and would love to hear your perspective.
how is it possible to know what is _actually_ of value as opposed to what is _apparently_ of value?
in your profile you mention:
> I do software nowadays, but I'm constantly looking for opportunities to do something actually useful for humanity.
how does one arrive at a belief about what is useful?
It's in our heads, but since we all run the same hardware architecture, it generalizes quite well.
even with this, this doesn’t address the concern of actuality versus appearance.
consensus reality has been wrong in the past, and can be shown wrong again.
so how can you be so sure?
Every protein has multiple functions, so we can't make changes easily without side effects. Bottlenecking human intervention specifically.
This is hubris. Everything that humanity may accomplish in the future, from editing its own genome to creating general artificial intelligence, is a product of that same evolutionary process. We do all that out of our innate need for self preservation and reproduction—evolutionary imperatives for all organisms.
But it’s more accurate to think of evolution as a universal computational process occurring within the substrate of (bio)chemistry. That computation will yield further computation (intelligence and its products).
If we stick to traditional, useful definition of biological evolution, then we can confidently say that it stopped being the driving force for plant and animal life no later than when we've first learned to communicate and remember ideas; we've made it irrelevant when we've learned to write. It still works on microscale, but that's mostly because things breed and die faster at that scale, there's more of it, and we can't efficiently poke at it with any sort of precision.
Again, people love teaching for analogy here but humans are just nothing like code, to be honest.
A classical example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve. Nobody in his right mind would design a nerve running from your brain to your larynx that way.
In code, a single typo breaks the whole thing. So spaghetti code by definition is bad and breaks easily.
Sure, we have a fuck ton of complexity. But it’s only messy to us because we don’t understand all the conditions that led to it.
Humans certainly have flaws, but in general we are as well suited to surviving on Earth as you possibly can be, especially on the whole.
I’d say: we’re so so much better designed than any code that exists anywhere today, that it’s a farce. We are literally the opposite of spaghetti code. We’re Antifragile!
A single typo sometimes breaks the whole thing. Sometimes, it does not. The same is true for genetic mutations in humans - most typos are harmless, a few give us nasty cancers.
"Spaghetti code" doesn't mean "broken". It means "hard to maintain". Our modern medical system is pretty decent proof that maintaining a human is quite a bit of work.
Furthermore, there are plenty of examples of single gene mutations/interventions that are deadly/crippling.
There are myriad of examples of our body having feature which you could equate to biological spaghetti.
Only in high-level languages, when you have to deal with grammar.
DNA is better compared to binary code fed to a CPU. There is no equivalent of "a single typo breaks the whole thing" there; whatever you feed the CPU, it will execute something. Whether you'll like the results or not is another question - but the same is true with biology. The DNA is there, physically, and it will interact with proteins in one way or another.
> A classical example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve. Nobody in his right mind would design a nerve running from your brain to your larynx that way.
The matter is, the possibilities of DNA are infinite, you can create Godzilla if you knew how. The problem is, nobody knows how, so evolution is all we have - random mutations and survival will lead to /something/. Even genetical engineering now is in essence copy pasting of certain parts that we know work in a specific way, bound by what currently exists. But if you could really grasp biology, that works down to the single molecule and atomic levels, and actually dictate it however you like, I think it would be the final technology we would ever need.
Extra Credit: A prehensile tail would be extremely useful in many situations and I believe may decrease the risk of injury for elderly people. With an adequately strong prehensile tail, older people would be able to use it as a sort of a tripod leg to keep themselves upright with less risk of falling.
But, I think the double use of orifices (air, food, urine, semen) is a good idea. Minimizing orifices seems to be an advantage... fewer avenues for outside stuff getting in. (And I don't think human sexual organs are necessarily dirtier due their location; urine is more or less sterile, and feces shouldn't really come into play under ordinary circumstances... )
No such advantage with our bodies, as they are only "worked on" by probabilistic processes.
Well, and doctors. Who often have to deal with unintended or undesired side effects of medications and surgical procedures.
If we're so insanely flexible and efficient, why do we have the same body plan as every other tetrapod? We walk upright, but our weight is cantilevered out from a spine that is manifestly not designed for that.
But you also can’t point to anything better.
I mean, not yet. The days of "let's tweak it so the blood vessels go behind the retina" or "let's add a bit more cartilage to the knees" aren't here yet, but they're probably coming eventually.
Evolution doesn't really optimize for the "keep this body running at age 100" scenarios that we find ourselves in lately, and there's a lot of legacy code.
I like the idea of evolution, because "it is what it is". It happens whether you believe it or not. It has no goal, it just happens. And, it's not that evolution "changes" species, it's that whoever survives becomes the definition of what a species is at all, therefore "evolution" is just the observable outcome, the process is natural selection. So, it's pointless to "blame" evolution, to say "it is not good enough". I, you, we don't even know what's "Good enough" and for whom. Even whatever we consider "humanity" is the outcome of our natural selection. Your very wish to live forever, is the outcome of our natural selection.
The wish to genetically engineer our species' future members, will only be judged good or bad by its outcome, not by our planning. What you see now is what works, and the proof it works is we are still here. For example, if we end up destroying the world and our species with nuclear weapons, the path of evolution giving us intellect will have proven to be a bad one for this branch of DNA called "human species".
I can only say I have a very bad gut feeling about conscious genetic altering of humans, and I trust there are many arguments to find if I analyze it. Perhaps it's only some aspect of my DNA's self preservation not wanting to lose over some made-up DNA.