"I'll do a little play on words here. Are you saying that biology isn't logical? Does it defy the laws of the universe, physics, and the axioms in math?"
No, he's saying that biology isn't human-designed. Human designs have several characteristics that stem from our limited cognition and limited ability to hold things in our heads at one time. Our designs tend to be highly modular, with distinct parts interacting in distinct ways, and with the failure of one part generally capable of taking the whole system down. There will generally be some clear separation of layers, with each layer having a distinct and clear responsibility. There is generally one way to accomplish something, or failing that, some very small set of ways. Our designs have to be this way, we can't deal with unabstracted systems, even at relatively small sizes.
To the extent that you immediately think of some piece of software that violates all of this, you also will notice that software is also pretty much end-of-lifed. We can't build in any other way for very long.
Biology doesn't work that way. Yes, there are parts you can identify, but they aren't like human-designed parts, either. They freely run all the way across the "abstraction hierarchy", such as it is. If evolution made it so that this one function that you think ought to be done by the kidneys is actually done by blood vessels, so be it. Even drawing lines around "functions" is quite difficult when you get down to it, the deeper you go and the more precise you try to make the line, the more of the body you end up implicating. It's all just jumbled together, with redundant pathways for everything.
We know about the "functions" of things that we know about precisely because we are looking for them in the first place. We have a cognitive bias (in the machine learning sense of a bias induced by what we are capable of even expressing in our heads in the first place, not the usual English sense of bias) for these things, so that's what we find. But whereas in human designs these functions are real (we made them that way), in biology they are only approximations. To the extent you look at a system in the human body and see something with clear, well-defined parts, that's because you can't really perceive the full complexity of what's actually there, not because it isn't complex and quite tangled.
And I gotta tell you, having my brain scanned and converted into an approximation of its original state that will use an approximation of how brains work is a bit of an intimidating prospect.
No, he's saying that biology isn't human-designed. Human designs have several characteristics that stem from our limited cognition and limited ability to hold things in our heads at one time. Our designs tend to be highly modular, with distinct parts interacting in distinct ways, and with the failure of one part generally capable of taking the whole system down. There will generally be some clear separation of layers, with each layer having a distinct and clear responsibility. There is generally one way to accomplish something, or failing that, some very small set of ways. Our designs have to be this way, we can't deal with unabstracted systems, even at relatively small sizes.
To the extent that you immediately think of some piece of software that violates all of this, you also will notice that software is also pretty much end-of-lifed. We can't build in any other way for very long.
Biology doesn't work that way. Yes, there are parts you can identify, but they aren't like human-designed parts, either. They freely run all the way across the "abstraction hierarchy", such as it is. If evolution made it so that this one function that you think ought to be done by the kidneys is actually done by blood vessels, so be it. Even drawing lines around "functions" is quite difficult when you get down to it, the deeper you go and the more precise you try to make the line, the more of the body you end up implicating. It's all just jumbled together, with redundant pathways for everything.
We know about the "functions" of things that we know about precisely because we are looking for them in the first place. We have a cognitive bias (in the machine learning sense of a bias induced by what we are capable of even expressing in our heads in the first place, not the usual English sense of bias) for these things, so that's what we find. But whereas in human designs these functions are real (we made them that way), in biology they are only approximations. To the extent you look at a system in the human body and see something with clear, well-defined parts, that's because you can't really perceive the full complexity of what's actually there, not because it isn't complex and quite tangled.
And I gotta tell you, having my brain scanned and converted into an approximation of its original state that will use an approximation of how brains work is a bit of an intimidating prospect.