A friend writes, regarding a comment in an earlier news post on how humans are better than computers at guessing disease gene patterns.
News wrote: This story somehow got lost around here last week. Anyway, it makes sense that humans would do better than computers at guessing biology issues. It helps to be biological.
It’s not being biological that helps, it’s being an agent; all computer algorithms that ever have or ever will exist are the antithesis of agents. Being something utterly different, agency cannot be reduced to IF-THEN-ELSE.
Friend is probably right, come to think of it.
A sponge is entirely biological, but cannot do any intellectual work.