• The channel debated whether artificial intelligence has already been created and whether human perception of time or free will might be fundamentally skewed, framing these as urgent questions for transhumanist inquiry.

• faceface argued that living systems already perform computation: bacterial genetic regulatory networks, developmental oscillators (e.g., Drosophila segmentation), and the λ-phage operon provide robust switching and oscillatory behaviors that can be re-wired for engineered computation without deep molecular-biology hacking.

• A cluster of PubMed links (PMID: 7630396, 18077424, 18004276, 14530388, 12399590) was shared to support the claim, highlighting Uri Alon’s “network motifs” framework for identifying over-represented circuit patterns in biological networks that can be exploited for synthetic biology.

• kanzure countered that the goal is to “shred the damn cells,” implying a move toward cell-free or non-biological substrates rather than leveraging intact cellular machinery.

• percent_ raised practical DIY-bio questions about the legality and logistics of mailing or ordering E. coli cultures, noting that pure samples could be distributed cheaply among “researchers” (a suggested euphemism for biohackers).

• kanzure initiated a “stalking mode” to locate local university researchers on Freenode, aiming to build an on-campus bioinformatics collaboration network.

• The group discussed the need for an up-to-date list of commercial suppliers for microbial cultures and for recent bioinformatics papers to feed into an open wiki on sustained attention and other cognition-related projects.