*related=http://videosift.com/video/Craig-Venter-unveils-synthetic-life

The Great Debate -- "What is Life?" with J. Craig Venter has been added as a related post - related requested by kulpims on that post.

Craig Venter unveils "synthetic life"! has been added as a related post - related requested by kulpims.

>> ^chilaxe:

>> ^NetRunner:
A real TED talk would be titled "The Impact of Technology on Society in the 21st Century: From the Android phone to Androids, and Beyond" and would be given by an unassuming but compelling professor of some sort, rather than a businessman intent on making himself a physical manifestation of pure hubris.
But, good idea for a viral marketing campaign.

They're positioning him like a Steve Jobs or Craig Venter: the guys who can make the future work years before anyone else can figure it out.


Ah, a soulless sociopath.

(Jobs, not Venter. They really don't belong in the same sentence or thought process.)

>> ^NetRunner:

A real TED talk would be titled "The Impact of Technology on Society in the 21st Century: From the Android phone to Androids, and Beyond" and would be given by an unassuming but compelling professor of some sort, rather than a businessman intent on making himself a physical manifestation of pure hubris.
But, good idea for a viral marketing campaign.


They're positioning him like a Steve Jobs or Craig Venter: the guys who can make the future work years before anyone else can figure it out.

He's intelligent, but Craig Venter is also a bit of an egomaniac.

The difference is actually a bit more, the traditional view is 2%, but I've heard Craig Venter say its probably a bit more than that, maybe as much as 5%. But anyway, like other commenters have suggested, this is a bit psuedo-biologistic by Tyson. He still has a point, but I think hes best when he sticks to astronomoy and astrophysics. Difference in genetic makeup is not the same thing as difference in phenotype. For example, only relatively few genes control the development of the entire brain, but even if we identify them all and understand them all, we are still far from understanding the brain itself, because the brain is more than just a product of genes, its a product of development and lots of complex interactions.

But his point does pretty much stand, we could all look like blabbering morons to more intelligent creatures. Atleast Tyson is not anyware near as idiotic as Michio Kaku on evolution, that was just embarrassing

>> ^spaceman:

Why I don't care:
1) You once believed in a god.
2) You are a guy.


@spaceman | The reason why the rest of us watch and listen to "just some guy; who believed in God":

The only reason you can type your sentence is from/due-to "other" men. Religion in all forms is from "other" men (unless you claim to hear voices or a physical divinity; but, please, not as an affront to you, make sure you're not psychotic or schizophrenic before telling us your interesting story as that is the case almost always; same with drug use; same with some other illnesses: narcolepsy, sleep walking, night terrors/sleep paralysis, and many other sleep related issues and all nervous system illnesses). Only a few things below talk more about what you said.
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A little more to add to the conversation. Hopefully, this gets it all out as it will be fairly long, but the video is hard to reply to in a short manner. I hope this covers a large extent of what I wish to say about this very well done video witness/testimony.


One set of values you can research and witness to it's validity on your own, as he has done. Science also allows for this methodology, using the well known precept of "The Scientific Method".

A quick example is that many people of faith, even Evid3nc3, talks of feeling "x" with their "hearts" and knowing "x" with their "soul". In science there is nothing more than a simple, yet complicated, physical processes. It's all a creation and manifestation in your brain; if you think you "feel" something with your heart you're causing minor self-hysteria to the extent of creating a minor hallucination.

The "soul" is called the(primarily in psychology, neuroscience, and neurology; there are many other terms that try to mean "you"; typically, in grossly inaccurate ways, such as: ghosts, "psychic" remote viewing, many religions use of the magical-energy-divine soul, etc...) psyche which is typically (starting from the outer-functions and moving into core-functions) sensory systems, language center, feelings, memory, and then the key-piece the neo-cortex. So it must be understood that your brain does a lot of things still baffling (mostly the mechanics or mechanisms of function and chemistry), but the overall picture is fairly clear.

But, the brain is not a floating energy source, nor is it an absolute definition at any given point or time. Depending on how and where you look at the brain the very concept of you is different. It more akin to superposition of an electron or a kaleidoscope; the definition of you is not concrete until measured and even then you are already not what was measured.

Even from what little we do know, belief plays a central role in how our neo-cortex makes decisions and operates (even with memory and other functions, which is why we do make many mistakes as it's due to how our brain physically commits to anything it must or will do; it's perhaps the single best reason to show why, "To err is human; to forgive, divine."; you don't understand the human condition if you cannot forgive...). Could this translate into a bigger picture; our connected neurons telling us to accept faith and belief, sometimes, because that is what it does at the small scale?

*Offtopic Look up articles, books, and videos (look at TED for Marvin Minsky, Jeff Hawkins, Craig Venter, Jonathan Haidt and others --some of which are here on the sift-- related topics on there like the Mind, AI, facial-pattern-contextual-semantics-divergent-cat vs. dog software based Recognition, and then other media pertaining to 'Artificial Intelligence') or if you want to know strictly about how the brain works and makes it's decisions, look for a type of setup called a "hierarchical structure"; also known as a pyramid or pyramid scheme. One cell makes a decision based off of the accumulations of "guesses" the other millions of cells connected to it made; these cells are fundamentally the foundation for that setup, but the neurons are more flexible than that as each can be a parent and also part of the "foundation" structure, making the brain a fantastic structure. With time this becomes accurate (this occurs in less than a few milliseconds), although our vision, for an example, is horrifically distorted and wrong, if you could look at one "frame" based on a few cells. Only a small fraction of the frame would be correct; literally it would be as though your senses got one pixel correct in a 1080p image. Yet, repeat this millions of times with different data sets each round (and this is done as said above, fast) you get an accurate picture; or at the least 20/20-to about one-arc minute (the resolution for the human eye, on average).

One set you can't test, we call that belief or faith. "What is the reasoning for taking the leap of faith?", this is what you have to defend at this point. If faith is your only defense, I will (like many others will) assume you haven't looked into your own faith enough yet or you even refuse to look out of fear of being wrong. If you do not understand the topic you must be willing to ask for help as he did or you'll be a slave to your willful decision of ignorance, to the extent that you feel compelled to defend them, but you never convince anyone except yourself--and for yourself it is only because of the rote-righteous indignation.

If it's true it should withstand all scrutiny. Unless truth isn't your ultimate goal. Then, for us and many others there is no reason to follow your faith. Usually, this type of merit and defense are directly related to age due to learning this all when you're a child and devoid of an intense ability to decipher, attribute values, connect, and draw in a belief (if with some facts and proof you could call it a hypothesis).

It's all from men... I'm wagering you're dismissing this flippantly due to religion; if not what exactly is your point, as I truly would like to know why and where this claim of non-relativistic knowledge comes from, without a woman or man?

Also, if it has to do with his belief in being mistaken for believing in God that's a moot point as we have all erred in life. I know of no person that has reliably been able to "claim divinity", other than Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, etc... But, we also know now that mental illness and other factors can account for any manic or psychotic leanings. We also know magicians (or magister, proper) have been around A LONG TIME.

Plus, as Arthur C. Clarke put it, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.". Which then one must ask another question, "Can divinity itself ever be established as being magic only?". This is then rounded up by a statement from Larry Niven (sometimes called Niven's Law(s)), "Any sufficiently rigorously defined magic is indistinguishable from technology.". These collide and distinctly form a conclusion about divinity and any of it's powers (descriptive magic or divinity and it's "how to use it" manual are indefensibly getting closer in each step to being more akin to physics; plus the Christian God hates magic, which begs the question, "Why do you need a God, if we can exact the same effects?"):

Divinity can only hope to use advanced knowledge and technology in a collusion to bring about one standpoint alone: "divinity" if described by God in any kind of ruleset (some of it is in the bible, already) stands on a rigorously tested and time shown: shaky ground.

Men would be gods whether God existed or not.

(P.S.: only the beginning and some bits here and there are for you, @spaceman. The rest is for our vestibule.)

Again I must add that this is a great find @dystopianfuturetoday.
You're doing yourself a great disservice not watching it (or all of it as the case may be).

>> ^entr0py:

>> ^Sketch:
Finally, intelligent design is actually a legitimate scientific fact! But WE are the intelligence. We created life, like we created God.

Except they didn't actually design anything, it's 100% a copy of an existing bacteria's genome. I don't really get the important distinction between this and conventional genetic engineering. Either way your starting point is the genome of an existing cell, which you proceed to fuck with.


My god man, do you have any idea how technically complicated the genome is? We took the simplest bacteria and it still took 15 YEARS (and a millions of dollars) with current technology. This process just proves that we have the capability to build a genome from scratch (whether it's designed to a template of a previous genome or to one devised by us). I think the fact that we have accomplished this much is absolutely incredible and opens doors in our future to lead to the vaccines and cures of diseases we never even thought possible.

>> ^Sketch:

Finally, intelligent design is actually a legitimate scientific fact! But WE are the intelligence. We created life, like we created God.


Except they didn't actually design anything, it's 100% a copy of an existing bacteria's genome. I don't really get the important distinction between this and conventional genetic engineering. Either way your starting point is the genome of an existing cell, which you proceed to fuck with.

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