Sheri Markose has been invited as Keynote Speaker at the prestigious BICT 2019 – 11th EAI International Conference on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies
13-14 March 2019, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States
Paper Title and Abstract
The Digital Origins of Intelligence: How we became smart and protean
In the spirit of the ‘dynamic’ genome of Barbara McClintock, I use a new notion of a Genomic Nash Equilibrium (GNE), to show how the Gödel-Turing-Post conditions of computational universality, acquired at critical points of genomic evolution, make us smart and protean. The key aspect of a GNE is that the genomic system encodes the famous self-referential Gödel sentence as one where a code self-reports it is under attack or negated by, what is effectively, a hacker/virus (aka ‘Liar’). If the latter cannot be eliminated, such code based digital systems embark on an arms race of novelty production with syntactic objects or phenotypes not previously there. It is widely known that viral software of genomic transposons provides scope for reuse and replication as in routine digital operations of ‘scissor-paste’ and ‘copy-paste’. However, few recognize that the workings of the adaptive immune system (AIS) in tissues like the thymus medulla, as also the mirror neuron system for complex social cognition, are text book cases of information processing in a formal recursive Gödel meta-mathematics. This is typically organized in a tuple of a code centred self and the ‘other’ in an offline domain of recordings and simulations that have a bijective relationship with online machine executions of the same codes. The thymus medulla remarkably makes ‘copies’, in an offline environment, of ~85% of the genome that involves codes of programs that halt, viz. are ‘theorems’ in the system of ribosomal machine executions of 3-D prints of the morphology and regulation of the organism. Application of negation on these halting codes generates a digitally listable set of codes of self-antigens analogous to refutable propositions formalized in the Emil Post theory of creative and productive sets. GNE implies exciting new hypotheses on AIS and social cognition, and on the high incidence of repeat sequences in the human genome due to the model of regulatory networks as a distributed ledger.