HLP Network.
The human immune system is quite a unique beast. It isn't a species - all the cells that make up the immune system are human. But the system itself doesn't think. It isn't self-aware. However, it demonstrates remarkable traits of "intelligence" in spite of that. The system communicates among trillions of other cells in the body, independently of them. It adapts to new problems as they are detected. It demonstrates remarkable capacity for memory and learning. Each immune response to a similar threat is faster and more specific than the previous one. But, it's behaviour isn't predictable because it is randomized. The immune system doesn't compare each foreign threat to others and adapt previous responses to a new threat. Instead, it begins with a broad-based, randomized response that, as an infection procedes, becomes progressively narrower until it develops exactly the right response for that particular infection. It stores that response in a built-in cell-mediated memory to be used again should the same threat re-emerge. If the nature of the threat changes, the immune system doesn't respond with the previous tried and true method - it starts from scratch. The immune system is also eternal - so long as the human organism that houses it exists, the immune system will exist. It has no care for specific organs, or mental state, loss of limb, or other infirmities. It's heuristic-set purpose is to destroy entities that threaten its host organism. It has no care for the host, and it will continue to produce the cells necessary to its function so long as there are resources available to produce those cells and can continue to do so even after the host human being is functionally dead - both heart and brain cease to function.
See why I say the Shivans are a non-sentient hyperintelligent immune system?
It's for these kinds of posts that I come back to this forum so often!
Yeah, you summed it up perfectly, and I can comfortably say that what differentiate us is a quibble in semantics (or, very little). Let me explain. When you say that the "shivan response (...) can be completely randomized for each encounter", and its immune system analogy and so on, you did convey the sense that there *is* a randomizer within the heuristic, and that this fact is a very important feature of the shivan system.
Well, I'd say that your description of the immune system paints a very different story. What we have here is a system completely deterministic with simple heuristics, in which each agent does exactly what it was built for. However, because the system is inherently just too complex, non-linearity, strange atractors and the likes are the observable patterns from the
outside (like say a doctor who is trying to observe a patient), making predictions completely impossible.
So the doctors say they are "random". But they are not inherently so. They are just observably so by the doctors, who can't see every cell interaction and calculate exactly what will happen.
So, IOW, if the Shivan behavior is like the immune system, then it follows that it is completely deterministic and, at least conceptually,
predictable. But just like any non-linear system, any small deviation of the reality from the model used to make the prediction will result in such a big change that will render the model useless.
Battuta has, IIRC, completely confirmed this notion when he spoke about the shivans behaving in an "input-output" kind of way. Which is also a more generalized notion than the immune system analogy. The immune system analogy may well be the one used by the BP writers, but it has a very very big failure within it. I'll explain.
The immune system does not care if it wins or loses, game theory and etc., I agree. But the reason it doesn't have to care about that stuff is because the natural selection already did that job for it. The culling of most types of immune systems by the culling of the genes that generate them has happened throughtout natural history, and we cannot say the same about the Shivans, unless the following is true:
- We live in a kind of natural selection megaverse where the survival of the universe is required to make "child universes" (ala Smolin, etc.);
- The Shivan system is anti-fragile itself, and unlike the immune system, it actually learns, adapts and alters itself with every encounter with any other species
Probably Battuta et al have a taste for the latter one. However, the problem remains: how did an unintelligent species that is merely a bunch of heuristics even survived for so long? We know the answer to the problem in the case of the immune system. I still do not understand entirely the feedback that makes the shivan system inherently anti-fragile.
