Submitted by samkaplan on Mon, 02/26/2007 - 11:35am.
I don't think that Wolfram is saying is saying that Cellular Automata are responsible for human behavior—that would be a little ridiculous.
All he's saying is that all life—human beings included—could have possibly emerged from something that resembles a specific type of cellar automata—that is, a mix of chaos and order.
Heather, I think you're also reading into Wolfram too much. He's not saying that human life is a deterministic system, or that people are computationally reducible. But again, what he is saying—if I correctly understand him—is that like some cellular automata, human life—and indeed, all life—thrives on a delicate balance of chaos and order—what Langton would describe using lambda values.
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Oversimplifying Wolfram
I don't think that Wolfram is saying is saying that Cellular Automata are responsible for human behavior—that would be a little ridiculous.
All he's saying is that all life—human beings included—could have possibly emerged from something that resembles a specific type of cellar automata—that is, a mix of chaos and order.
Heather, I think you're also reading into Wolfram too much. He's not saying that human life is a deterministic system, or that people are computationally reducible. But again, what he is saying—if I correctly understand him—is that like some cellular automata, human life—and indeed, all life—thrives on a delicate balance of chaos and order—what Langton would describe using lambda values.