Earlier this month, I had read that a scientist, J. Craig Venter, created the first synthetic life form. While he didn’t create the entire bacterium from nothing, he did create the DNA from chemicals and a computer program to assemble the 4 base-pairs into a string of 600,000 pairs, using known sequences to produce the desired resulting life form. Once he had the DNA, he then inserted into an existing cell. The DNA was given instructions to overwrite the existing DNA & cell contents, and reproduce itself.
Then he made a succinct observation: DNA is nothing more than the software to the cell’s hardware, that makes a life form living.
The human body contains 3billion pairs to create the full sequence, which is going to be much more challenging to create from scratch. But the concept of software-to-hardware is something that can be extrapolated, and conjectured about to arrive at some interesting hypotheses.
The main question I have, since posting a series questioning religion on another of my blogs, is “what is it that makes humans human?” Some people believe creativity, emotion, or the existence of a “soul”. Others believe its self-awareness, compassion, sympathy and the like.
Until I can figure out what the main (non-biological) difference between a human brain and a computer program is, I’m going to assume the position that anything I can do, a computer can be programmed to do. After all, humans don’t come pre-programmed from birth with all the knowledge and experience the world has to offer.
The next couple posts are probably going to challenge some viewpoints and force the mind’s eye to view humanity and life from the point of view of an inanimate object. At least, that is my hope. I’ll have some more posts up in the coming days describing the algorithms necessary to program some of the more “human” traits.
