[HN Gopher] Is the emergence of life an expected phase transitio...
___________________________________________________________________
Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the
evolving universe?
Author : harscoat
Score : 269 points
Date : 2024-01-23 14:06 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Seems like a common theme these days, to find some theory of
| math/physics to explain life/evolution/consciousness
|
| E/Acc -> Second law of thermodynamics leads to 'life' as way of
| increasing entropy. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-
| thermodynamics-theory-o...
|
| Constructor Theory -> A constructor is an entity that can cause
| the task to occur while retaining the ability to cause it again.
| - and Life is constructors.
|
| Assembly Theory -> Lee Cronin. Assembly Theory defines all
| objects by their capacity to be assembled or broken down using
| minimal paths. https://iai.tv/articles/a-new-theory-of-matter-
| may-help-expl...
|
| Whatever Donald Hoffman is saying lately. Which might not be
| about underlying layers, just how we can't know them.
|
| etc...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It's almost teleological. Many people have ruled out God, but
| still want there to be purpose or direction.
| monkaiju wrote:
| Thats exactly what it is i think. Theyre unable to find
| meaning in the real world and need an equally mystical hand
| waivey narrative
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Not my intention to toss science out the window.
|
| All theories are just ideas or musings in the beginning.
| Until they are further defined, researched and proven.
|
| Things like the earth circling the sun, sounded crazy at
| first. It also went against god.
|
| If all independent 'thoughts' are diss-allowed because only
| "god" can provide the answers, then we'd still be living in
| trees wondering why the sun comes up.
|
| How do you think we have anything, without someone, at some
| point, asking 'how does this work?'.
| monkaiju wrote:
| Did you respond to the intended comment? Seems unrelated
| to mine
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| The parent of yours was about God, and you seemed to
| agree with that one. Seemed related. Weren't you equating
| someone's proposed theory as hand wavy mysticism, because
| of a lack of meaning in their lives?
|
| But maybe not. I could me reading too much into it.
|
| Apologies.
| mjburgess wrote:
| This is written like a literary academic blog article rather than
| an academic paper in the sciences. It's fully of literary free
| association and hyperbolic language, etc.
|
| At best it's a sort of mission statement for what would need to
| be a research programme with many many academic papers behind it.
| As it is, I'm not sure what the authors aim here is. It's a blog
| post.
| Cacti wrote:
| There's lots of crap on Arxiv.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Wait, you mean I can use Arxiv as a blog instead of Drupal or
| Medium? Hold me beer!
| gus_massa wrote:
| Yep. For example, a few years ago a "cryptography researcher"
| posted in arXiv a new method to factorize numbers. The fist
| 10 page were an explanation of the rule that if the sum of
| the digits of N is a multiple of 3, then N is a multiple of
| 3. Then he explained something more interesting but the
| details were uninteligible. I skeemed the second part and I
| thought it was wrong, but after reading the firt part I
| didn't bother to verify all the details.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| like everything on arxiv
| bordercases wrote:
| Stuart Kauffman is a figure in the field with much more
| difficult books if that's more to your liking.
|
| https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-order...
| ixaxaar wrote:
| I think Kauffman has been developing this set of ideas for a
| while now. I remember reading his "the origins of order" and
| find a lot of the ideas from the book here in more evolved
| forms. He really got me into visualising complex systems and
| their state spaces etc.
| jyounker wrote:
| It's more like summary of a 30+ year research program with many
| many many academic papers behind it.
|
| He's a leading theoretician of complex systems, and this is
| probably intended to wrap up his work before he dies, and to
| provide guidance for those coming after him.
| uoaei wrote:
| M J Burgess, "semi-professional philosopher", doesn't recognize
| the context that this side of complex systems exists in and
| pooh-poohs the paper, demonstrating the "semi" more than the
| "professional".
| paulpauper wrote:
| arxiv is suffering from major mission/feature creep. IMHO, it
| should be limited to math and physics and maybe quantitative
| finance. There are too many low quality or blog-like papers
| being published. Maybe it would be better if it was spun off to
| a different website.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| >arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access
| archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the
| fields of physics, mathematics, computer science,
| quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics,
| electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.
| Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
|
| How does arxiv suffer? What mission creep? What do you mean
| too many?
| cscheid wrote:
| Time to break out John Baez's checklist:
| https://archive.org/details/TheCrackpotIndex
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Maybe better link, more readable :
| https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
| tgv wrote:
| Never heard of it, but it seems to give a good digest of the
| format. Unfortunately, it seems aimed at non-academic
| crackpots. It doesn't even award points for vacuous mentioning
| Schrodinger or Kant.
| jyounker wrote:
| I was really turned off by the mention of Kant at first, but
| reading on it's relevant to the discussion. This is a real
| scientist applying Kant's idea to real phenomena in a useful
| way. Please read the paper in detail.
| tgv wrote:
| I had glossed it, and the part where they make a surprise
| move to Kant, is ... not very convincing. The way they
| describe it doesn't make sense. It's not as if there's any
| proof that a "Whole" is life or vice versa. It's just one
| of their assumptions.
|
| If we take their writing as some form of evidence for it,
| they claim children inherit your Parts, but that's not
| true. They also imply that Parts cannot exist outside the
| Whole, which is patently false when taken literally. But in
| the loose sense in which they seem to use it, I could
| totally see a piano as a Whole: keys, snares, hammers,
| sound board, it doesn't make sense outside a piano. Also,
| notable features of life aren't included nor implied by the
| concept Whole.
|
| They also call Collectively Autocatalytic Sets an
| "established mathematical theory", but it's a mathematical
| property that can be true of some domain. It doesn't prove
| anything. There aren't any proofs involving that property
| in the paper either. Later they call it a "chemical
| reaction system," which seems to be more to the point, but
| there are so many of those.
|
| It's just another idea, and not an original one either.
| Wikipedia: "Autocatalytic sets constitute just one of
| several current theories of life." That Autocatalytic sets
| by itself isn't enough to explain life may be a point, but
| there's no reason to assume they've found the magical
| ingredient in Kant.
| jyounker wrote:
| The first author is Stuart Kaufmann:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman
|
| Not a crackpot.
| gala8y wrote:
| that's great.
|
| it gets steep from 29 onward. and for a reason.
| ta8645 wrote:
| Can't help but wonder, is AI an expected phase transition in the
| evolution of life in the universe? Is life really just the larval
| stage of a higher order intelligence?
| haolez wrote:
| In the context of the universe, I wouldn't call it
| "intelligence" versus "artificial intelligence". I would call
| it "organic intelligence" vs "inorganic intelligence".
| neom wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism
|
| :)
| junon wrote:
| Not quite sure this is what GP meant.
| irrational wrote:
| http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-
| stories/UBooks/TheyMade.sh...
| Koshkin wrote:
| That's reductionist. (Also, can't A.I. be "organic," say,
| like the OLED? :)
| Avicebron wrote:
| I imagine anything backing that up lends some credibility to
| the true believers, likely why this poorly written paper has
| made it to hn.
|
| A rule of thumb around here is I often measure my salt grain
| size by how self-important the article makes hners feel.
| ta8645 wrote:
| Well it's true, or not, regardless of how any of us feel
| about it. It's just fun to wonder.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Well it 's true, or not, regardless of how any of us
| feel about it_
|
| Yes, but not with the same probabilities of being true in
| both cases (the cases being whether we feel good or bad
| about it).
|
| Something makes it to HN because HNers like it. And not
| true things (feel good articles and popular sentiments) are
| more likely to be liked while not being true, compared to
| true but not likable stories.
| brabel wrote:
| Are you aware that this "poorly written paper" is the work of
| a leading researcher of the origins of life on Earth?
| Cacti wrote:
| AI is not intelligent, even in the abstract sense
| coldtea wrote:
| And I say it is. What now? How can these two statements be
| reconciliated?
|
| (Pointing out that this is like, your opinion, man)
| willy_k wrote:
| Could you elaborate? Do you mean the current state of AI?
|
| I would argue that current models have some behaviors that
| one could liken to intelligence, even if it's all just
| operations on 1s and 0s. Of course, this depends on your
| definition of intelligence. Mine is along the lines of "can
| develop a representation of a problem space and use that to
| predict optimal actions given current input". Which current
| AI, most animals, fungi, and humans can do. Sentience is a
| different question, I'd argue that only humans and a few
| species of animal (Dolphins, Elephants, apes) are sentient as
| of now, though it seems highly possible that machines will
| join that group by the end of the century, if not sooner.
| MetallicDragon wrote:
| Using what definition of intelligence?
| paxys wrote:
| No, because AI is (for now at least) shaped and constrained by
| us humans rather than developing free based on the laws of the
| universe. Is it really "evolution" if a judge can rule that it
| violates copyright and stop all progress overnight? Or a random
| developer can add a bit of code to make sure the answers
| appease the right set of people?
|
| What we have today is a crude software approximation mimicking
| what we think AI should be, but that AI itself is nowhere in
| sight.
| basil-rash wrote:
| What makes you confident our evolution didn't occur the same
| way? The "fossil records" of the two are similar in many
| ways: lots of baby steps, giant leap with no known
| intermediary states, lots of baby steps, ...
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > giant leap with no known intermediary states
|
| That's just evidence of absent records, not that there are
| no records.
| basil-rash wrote:
| Yes and?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| And if we're building off a bad initial premise it
| weakens the whole argument. "AI could be evolving just
| like us!" doesn't make sense when we don't know how we
| evolved.
| basil-rash wrote:
| The initial argument was just as bad: "AI can't be
| evolving like us", when we have no clue how we evolved.
|
| All I'm doing is calling out the intellectual dishonesty
| is making any claims about something we know nothing of.
| ta8645 wrote:
| > (for now at least)
|
| Yeah, a lot of people get hung up on the term AI as it exists
| today, and protesting that it doesn't deserve such
| consideration. I should have been more explicit that I was
| speaking in the much more general sense, and on an
| evolutionary timescale, not about technology we'd recognize
| today.
| louthy wrote:
| > No, because AI is (for now at least) shaped and constrained
| by us humans rather than developing free based on the laws of
| the universe
|
| Aren't humans part of the universe's rules? What makes AI
| development any less 'free' than any other emergent property?
| digging wrote:
| > shaped and constrained by us humans rather than developing
| free based on the laws of the universe
|
| This logic doesn't hold. Humans are part of the universe and
| obey all its laws. It's arbitrary to say bacteria and bonobos
| and stone tools are naturally occurring but AI aren't. We
| distinguish them because we're conscious and we have the
| experience of choice, but to say our creations aren't natural
| to the universe implies that our consciousness is not a
| natural phenomenon.
| moate wrote:
| It feels like you're simply stating the predators and
| outside influences that are affecting AI's evolution.
| Humans killed the dodo, maybe we kill the AI next
| throwaway143829 wrote:
| Makes you wonder what comes after AI. What's the "higher order"
| after AI that exists today or that will exist in 10 years? I'd
| guess we will never understand that level of intelligence,
| unless AI augments our brains somehow.
| eagerpace wrote:
| Perhaps they'll keep creating smaller transistors and more
| powerful processors eventually landing on a soft tissue-based
| version powered by glucose.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| You mean the second order toposophic level?
| https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/492d6fafbef2a
|
| Careful you might be going down a 14 hour rabbit hole.
| digging wrote:
| > unless AI augments our brains somehow
|
| Frankly, the more I think about AI, the less sense it makes
| to me that biological, single-body humans have any place in
| the future. As soon as we can digitize our minds, why
| wouldn't people begin to do so? Bodies could be inhabited at
| will, and death will be a thing of the past as we're able to
| store backups. I'm sure some will refuse and be left behind,
| just as we have Amish communities today, with a similar level
| of influence on civilization. And in the case of digital
| people, I think it's likely they'll share in the intellectual
| advancements of AI, if such a distinction even exists.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Once flying cars are as cheap and easy to own and operate
| as regular cars, why would anyone buy a non-flying car?
| digging wrote:
| I think you're going to need to explain your position a
| little better.
| creer wrote:
| Digitization is one direction but I think augmentation is
| perhaps a more likely one. Or a first one. Digitization can
| follow in a "Ship of Theseus" fashion.
|
| And augmentation branches then in AI as symbiont versus AI
| as desktop assistant.
| digging wrote:
| > Digitization is one direction but I think augmentation
| is perhaps a more likely one. Or a first one.
|
| First seems likely, but as a permanent alternative I
| don't know why a species would eschew lightspeed
| transportation and effortless immortality for the
| fragility and slowness of an organic body. It's possible
| there _are_ good reasons, but I don 't know of any.
| darepublic wrote:
| By AI I guess you mean complex self replicating machines that
| were originally created by other forms of life
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| "expected phase transition" seems a loaded phrasing, and
| implies a deterministic evolution, which I really don't think
| we should assume.
| jyounker wrote:
| An expected phase transition in this context is stochastic.
| The transition to order is expected, and there are bulk
| properties that are the same on each run, but the exact
| details differ each time.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I'd say so - it seems that life has to be created via
| evolution/competition, and left to run long enough evolution
| (survival/proliferation of the fittest) is likely produce
| organisms/entities that are not only better fit to the
| environment, but also better fit to the game. Evolution will
| tend to producing things that are better at evolving (faster to
| adapt). This includes things like multi-cellular life and
| sexual reproduction (creating variety via DNA mixing).
|
| One type of evolutionary niche that seems almost inevitable to
| arise in any complex environment is intelligence - the
| generalist able to survive and thrive in a variety of
| circumstances, and in the competitive game of evolution greater
| intelligence should outcompete lesser intelligence. Eventually
| you'll get critters sufficiently intelligent to build AI of
| their own level or higher, which may be regarded as another way
| to win the game of evolution - an intelligence that can evolve
| much faster than the type that bootstrapped it.
|
| It's interesting to consider does AI/AL (artificial life)
| really need to become autonomous and stand-alone, or can it be
| more like a virus that needs a host to survive. Stage one AI
| obviously needs a host, but maybe it never really needs to
| become stand-alone? It reminds me of (git author) Linus
| Torvalds' quote "real mean don't need backups" - you just
| release your software and have confidence it'll get replicated
| in git repositories worldwide. Maybe AI can be robust to
| extinction (not need a backup/body) just by becoming ubiquitous
| ?
| creer wrote:
| Right: hosts - or symbiotic life forms are a perfectly legit
| way to go. Plenty of them. And some form of "augmentation"
| might more socially / politically acceptable (ugh) than "AI
| on the loose".
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I'd reframe this question. What constitutes a phase transition
| at all in the sense being talked about here isn't super clear.
|
| There's a clear definition in chemistry and it has analogies in
| cosmology as the entire universe overall went through some
| early phase transitions in the vacuum state when it was of much
| greater average density. These are all related to qualititative
| changes in the properties of matter as temperature and density
| change.
|
| I would grant that life is a qualitatively different state of
| matter but it isn't as obvious as the more familiar phase
| transitions. We don't have a clear demarcation for what is and
| isn't life. This paper attempts to give a definition, but the
| fact that that is being done at all shows there isn't one
| already that is universally agreed-upon, unlike the definition
| of what is solid versus what is liquid. I guess all life we're
| aware of consists minimally of a semi-permeable barrier,
| ingests and stores energy inside of this barrier, and locally
| reduces entropy inside the barrier while dissipating heat
| and/or other byproducts into its environment.
|
| Life is, of course, not the only thing that does this. My house
| fits the same description. The only real line in the sand we
| have between things we consider alive and things we consider
| tools is that things we consider alive are all born and
| descended from other living creatures, not assembled from found
| or fabricated parts.
|
| Ultimately, though, this is a difference in origin, not a
| difference in quality or capability. Any tool, including
| electronic computing devices, can potentially have all of the
| same qualities as life if we could figure out how to make them
| self-assembling, self-healing, and self-reproducing. I guess we
| can do this with software, but it isn't obvious to me how to
| even demarcate a unit of "software" as an individual entity.
| How to demarcate intelligent from unintelligent software is
| even less clear, but nothing about the underlying state of
| matter the computations run on is any different, so I don't see
| how it involves anything we can call a phase transition without
| severely straining the term.
| creer wrote:
| That seems pretty likely - with some chance of hybrid still
| possible. That is, does AI take off and leave the goop in the
| dust. Or does AI become an augmentation of the current life
| forms - in an integrated form which perhaps can be admitted as
| continuation. The current AI products require quite a bit of
| compute power - but then augmentation doesn't need to be "on-
| board" the organic life form.
| creer wrote:
| Except for AI not being life yet. I'll go with intelligence
| already, but not yet growing, reproducing, producing,
| interacting or much of anything you might choose for "life".
| Which is cool: a (to be) life form which starts with
| intelligence before life!
| asow92 wrote:
| > We are, truly, Of Nature, not Above Nature.
|
| This sentiment has always made me question when people say things
| are "unnatural", "artificial", or "synthetic": If we ourselves
| are of nature, and these things are a byproduct of us, then
| aren't they naturally occurring?
|
| edit: added "synthetic" to reduce ambiguity.
| Drakim wrote:
| It makes more sense when you realize that unnatural and
| artificial are societal words akin to immoral or bad. Within
| that context they are perfectly crumulent words, it's only when
| we wish to have them be objective outside humanity that they
| don't make sense anymore.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _societal words_
|
| Indeed, all words are "societal." The meaning(s) of a word
| is/are always a matter of convention (or tradition).
| mc32 wrote:
| Ok, maybe synthetic is a better word for many instances of
| their use. As in synthesized with the aid human intervention.
| xixixao wrote:
| In which case coral reefs are also synthetic :)
| simiones wrote:
| Most coral reefs predate human intervention by a few
| hundred million years.
| GoldenRacer wrote:
| Where exactly is the line drawn for how much and what type of
| human intervention is required? When I cook food, human
| intervention is causing chemical reactions that change the
| composition of the food. I doubt many people consider grill
| marks to be unnatural or synthetic.
| simiones wrote:
| I think the line is typically drawn at any human
| intervention. I doubt many humans consider steaks to be a
| naturally occurring phenomenon.
|
| Now, there is a secondary fuzzy notion of "artificial"
| typically used in relation to "chemicals". I don't think
| that definition stands up to most serious scrutiny, and is
| at any rate unrelated to this article.
| asow92 wrote:
| That's exactly what's being--albeit atypically--advocated
| for here: That even steaks are a naturally occurring
| byproduct of humans and cows because humans and cows
| naturally exist.
| simiones wrote:
| Sure, but then of course absolutely everything is
| "naturally occurring". Plastic is a naturally occurring
| substance, computers are naturally occurring objects, C++
| is a natural language. Perhaps then only miracles from
| God (for those who believe in such things) are unnatural?
| asow92 wrote:
| Now you're getting it.
| simiones wrote:
| I am, but this is just not what those words mean, to
| anyone.
| asow92 wrote:
| It may be heterodox, but it's what it means to me, and
| I'm sure I'm not completely alone in feeling so.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| Plenty of people do not believe the conceptualization of
| a natural/synthetic divide does any good. There are
| entire subsets of philosophy, feminism, cyborg theory,
| etc. which talk about this.
| asow92 wrote:
| In your example, I'd opt for supernatural over unnatural,
| and I get your meaning.
| basil-rash wrote:
| That's one of those revelations that only sounds profound when
| everyone involved is really stoned. Outside of that, everyone
| knows the meaning of "unnatural" and we all get that the
| colloquial meaning and a strict etymological analysis don't
| quite align.
| wharvle wrote:
| The deeper insight is that _every_ definition of a word
| breaks down when you try to pin it precisely and in some
| absolute, universal-context sense to an exact meaning. That
| doesn't mean they can't be very, very useful.
| r34 wrote:
| That's why I use to claim that for me everything is a priori
| natural. Additionally I disagree every time I hear that
| "culture is the opposite of nature" (not sure where it comes
| from, but seems to be a well-grounded philosophical concept).
| For me it can't be so by the rules of logic alone.
|
| On the other side: we have a lot of taboos in the
| language/culture and not all of them are bad in terms of social
| well-being or happiness of individuals (the very simple example
| is that we sometimes lie to our kids). And I think that what we
| hide behind those taboos tends to emerge as "unnatural" or
| rather usually "supernatural". I also usually don't agree that
| we don't need a revolution in physics, but I understand it is
| so successful in creating all those working machines and we
| have to maintain them... ;)
| simiones wrote:
| "unnatural" or "artificial" have a very clear meaning: made by
| the intervention of humans in ways outside our base anatomical
| functions (so excluding babys or spilled blood). This
| intervention can be mechanical (Stonehenge), or biological
| (breeding animals to become more useful to humans), or chemical
| (synthesizing oil from plastic), or a complex combination of
| all of them (whisky); it is also transitive: anything created
| by an artificial object is also artificial.
|
| The fact that a naturally occurring thing (human beings) can
| create artificial things is not surprising under this
| definition.
|
| The definition can also be theoretically extended to other
| human-like agents, like hypothetical aliens. It hasn't been
| practically very necessary so far.
|
| Edit: I should note that this is the sense of "artificial" or
| "unnatural" that is used in the context of the article. There
| is a secondary meaning, used in phrases such as "artificial
| sweetner" vs "natural pesticide" that I don't think stands up
| too well to serious scrutiny.
| asow92 wrote:
| When birds make nests outside of their base anatomical
| functions, are they "unnatural"?
| simiones wrote:
| No, because birds are not humans.
|
| To be fair, "unnatural" is sometimes extended to refer to
| "life" instead of "humans", typically only when talking
| about the evolution of life or the search for
| extraterrestrial life. In that sense, then, yes - bird
| nests or termite mounds or coral reefs are unnatural. A
| more common wording for this same idea is something like
| "not created by geological processes".
| asow92 wrote:
| > We are, truly, Of Nature, not Above Nature.
|
| What gives humans the special designation of their
| byproducts being unnatural?
| simiones wrote:
| You're asking the question backwards. We have a concept,
| "byproduct of human action". We needed a word for this
| concept. We more or less arbitrarily chose "unnatural" or
| "artificial" as the words for this concept.
|
| You can argue that "unnatural" was a bad choice for this
| concept. But that's irrelevant to what words mean. There
| are other words like this - for example, "antisemitic"
| means "something that is against Jewish people", even
| though "semitic" means "of Jewish or Arabic or Phoenician
| etc. descent". So something discriminatory against
| semitic peoples is not necessarily anti-semitic.
|
| Natural language doesn't follow strict logical rules. And
| of course, natural language is in fact itself an
| artificial, unnatural, construct.
| asow92 wrote:
| Naturally, I would prefer to agree to disagree if you're
| willing.
| wharvle wrote:
| What's special is we decided that having a different
| category for things humans do is useful.
|
| It can both be true that everything humans do or create
| is natural because _all of existence and everything in
| it_ is natural, and also that some things humans do or
| create are artificial or un-natural, without
| contradiction, because context may be taken into account,
| and the same words can mean different things depending on
| how and why they 're employed.
| asow92 wrote:
| > "not created by geological processes"
|
| Did life begin with the geological process of protein
| chains forming in geothermal vents? I don't know, but it
| begs whether it is natural or not.
| simiones wrote:
| It's perfectly consistent that the origin of life itself
| can be a geological process but that the products of life
| itself are a separate category.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Nothing can be made or manufactured that is unnatural or
| artificial. By definition, anything that can exist in this
| universe is naturally part of the universe.
| simiones wrote:
| > By definition, anything that can exist in this universe
| is naturally part of the universe.
|
| Agreed.
|
| > Nothing can be made or manufactured that is unnatural or
| artificial.
|
| This doesn't follow in any way, not with the definition I
| gave, or with any definition I have ever heard. How do
| _you_ define "artificial" such that an iMac is not
| artificial?
|
| I've told you my definition (anything created by a human
| that is not an anatomical/physiological process of that
| human), and by my definition it is very clearly artificial
| (iMacs are created by humans, and they are not a bodily
| secretion of humans).
| carapace wrote:
| I feel that people who are clever enough to raise this question
| are also clearly clever enough to answer it for themselves.
|
| Anyway, operationally speaking the difference is in how easily
| the matter in question can be digested by living things.
|
| If it's easy to digest it's food, if it can't be digested at
| all then it's worse than artificial: it's anti-life.
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| I think life is going to be quite common as it seems it just
| requires liquid water and an extremely common type of rock in
| order to form alkaline hydro-thermic vents.
|
| It appears that life developed quite quickly in this manner after
| the formation of the Earth.
|
| The leap from bacteria and archaea to eukaryotes, however, took
| billions of years. So complex life may be rare.
| mavili wrote:
| Should be so common, right? Yet we're struggling to find any
| form of life. Not complex, just anything that lives.
| simiones wrote:
| I don't think we have any tools that could possibly detect
| bacterial life anywhere where we don't have a physical
| presence at the moment.
|
| That is, even if Venus were teeming with simple life on every
| square cm, I don't think any of our instruments could pick it
| up unless we send a probe to collect and analyze samples. So,
| at the moment we have no hope of detecting this type of life
| outside the solar system even if it were universal.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| We've got photos from the surface of Venus:
| https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-
| venus-...
|
| It's visibly not covered in moss, fungus, grasses, algae,
| slime.
|
| On Earth we talk about hot hydrothermal vents underwater:
| https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/survival-at-hydrothermal-
| vent... - this says " _the Pompeii worm [...] is one of the
| most heat-resistant multicellular animals on the planet,
| able to withstand temperature spikes of over 80degC. 'Most
| animals can't cope with anything over 40degC. Very close to
| the hot fluid, there are typically only microorganisms.
| These can survive in temperatures up to around 120degC,'
| explains Maggie._"
|
| The surface of Venus averages 462degC.
|
| Okay we won't know for sure unless we collect samples, but
| we do know any life would have to be heat resistant beyond
| anything we know of - beyond what our metal space probes
| could tolerate - and invisible to the naked camera even in
| 'teeming' quantities, and leaving no trace of waste gasses
| in the atmosphere which we can detect remotely.
|
| [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvkMwv9EYQQ - Venera: The
| Incredible Probe that the Soviets Sent to Venus ]
| saalweachter wrote:
| Humans, living on one planet: "Life is everywhere!"
|
| Humans, after soft landing probes on two other planets: "Life
| is nowhere out there! It must be only here!"
| pfdietz wrote:
| The smallest independent system we know of that is capable of
| Darwinian evolution has billions of atoms. How do you bridge
| the gap between "waste and rocks" and this system?
|
| Water and rocks may be necessary, but you have no evidence they
| are sufficient.
| zenkat wrote:
| I was fascinated by "At Home In The Universe" back in the 90s.
| But this seems like a rehashing of the same ideas, without new
| evidence or theory. Anything new here?
| TravisCooper wrote:
| If you have an erroneous view of life and it's origins on earth,
| you'll come up with variations of this type of thinking.
|
| However, life didn't evolve through a random walk of chemical
| reactions turning into complex systems with the ability to
| replicate and gain ever increasing complexity over time. Not
| possible.
|
| Entropy is increasing.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| > However, life didn't evolve through a random walk of chemical
| reactions turning into complex systems with the ability to
| replicate and gain ever increasing complexity over time. Not
| possible.
|
| How else could it have evolved?
| spuz wrote:
| Increase in entropy does not imply decrease in complexity.
| Actually physicists believe the relationship between entropy
| and complexity is more of a bell shape curve.
|
| https://youtu.be/MTFY0H4EZx4
| pfdietz wrote:
| Oh look, another person utterly mangling the meaning of the
| second law of thermodynamics.
|
| Evolution is in no way in contradiction to the 2nd law.
| hamburga wrote:
| I sat in on one of Stephen Wolfram's YouTube lectures on his new
| physics project, and asked him about his conception of life in
| the big picture of physics.
|
| His perspective was that (if I may take the liberty of
| paraphrasing him) there's nothing particularly special about life
| from the perspective of physics. What we call life simply
| correlates to parts of the physical world that have the highest
| degree of complexity and internal structure.
|
| Life is not binary.
| delichon wrote:
| Ok. What's an example of something low but non-zero on the
| spectrum of life?
|
| I'm having trouble thinking of one that isn't more properly
| "life-like".
| Balgair wrote:
| Viruses?
|
| New understandings of mega-viruses have let us to believe
| that the line is really quite fuzzy. Some of these larger
| viruses have double stranded DNA, some have ribosome like
| functions, some have ERs, etc. Kinda like a cell, but missing
| random parts that make them truly alive.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandoravirus
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| Potentially crystals as well. While we don't typically
| consider them part of "biology" there are some good
| arguments for including them as a form of life.
| hamburga wrote:
| All the ingredients of the primordial soup that bacteria grew
| from - water, methane, carbohydrates.
| prewett wrote:
| That sounds like saying that that Michaelangelo's Sistine
| Chapel paintings are nothing special in terms of information
| science; they just unusually have an unusually high entropy
| content.
|
| Technically true in both cases, but if physics is irrelevant to
| life, why not just answer the that way, instead of taking all
| the life out of Life.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Are you sure he didn't think you were only referring to the
| cellular automata rule?
| mavili wrote:
| There is nothing "expected" in a truly random universe. You
| cannot have your cake and eat it, there is either some sort of
| 'order' in the universe or there is none. You cannot place forms
| of order where it suits you but reject it when it doesn't.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| There are expectations even with random. E.g. if you have a
| truly random dice and you throw it millions of times you would
| expect the occurrence of each number to be similarly around
| 1/6.
|
| So it could be argued that given laws of universe, seeding it
| in any state could with very high odds come to an emergence of
| life, which makes it to be "expected".
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Think you are conflating just random pool balls, and particles
| with properties.
|
| If a few hydrogen and oxygen atoms get together and form water.
| That is expected, even if they are bouncing around randomly.
|
| This occurs at many different scales.
|
| There is random motion of particles of air in a room, but the
| overall 'pressure' can be measured and be constant.
| tobbe2064 wrote:
| This reminds me. There was a paper published a couple of years
| ago and posted here on HN that actually calculated the
| probability of life aminoacid-based life emerging. Based on the
| complexity of the chain needed to start replicating. The
| conclusion was that it was vanishingly small in the observable
| universe but only close to 0 in the full universe.
|
| I've since tried to find it without luck. Does anybody here know
| where I can read it or remember the article I'm talking about?
| XTXinverseXTY wrote:
| "Emergence of life in an inflationary universe"?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30047650
| imworkingrn wrote:
| Not sure if there what the term for this is, but rather than
| looking at the probability of X happening we should rather look
| at the "inevitability" of X happening in the context of the
| environment.
|
| In my experience, even though nature looks chaotic there is a
| very strict order to things which has evolved over millions of
| years and is a result of looking for the "most optimal way" to
| achieve a goal. A good example might be mycelium optimizing
| routes to nearby resources. Another might be ant colonies
| creating tunnels that are effective to navigate.
|
| The problem is, in my opinion, that we do not know what the
| final goal is. Therefore we cannot begin to analyze the
| inevitability of something as us, or life in general,
| happening. The answer may be perhaps found in religion or some
| similar "greater than life" endeavor.
| gus_massa wrote:
| " _Darwinian evolution is not a sufficient theory of life
| (claremont.org)_ "
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20568692
|
| I posted a comment there. They are using a very long protein
| instead of a short one. Nobody expect that the first functional
| protein is so long.
|
| Also, they are generating the protein using a " _random dice_ "
| instead of assuming a short crapppy version and using " _branch
| and prune_ " to find a longer and more efficient one.
| r721 wrote:
| Probably not this one, but it's on related topic:
|
| >There's plenty of time for evolution (2010)
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1016207107
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Extra-terrestrial life remains a hypothetical. There is no
| empirical evidence it exists beyond Earth. Until we witness some
| kind of artificial signal, or break open an asteroid with
| fossilized life, or somehow visit extra solar worlds with it, or
| get an unexpected visit, we're simply left arguing about the
| math.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| So hypothetically we observe that there is life somewhere, say
| beyond our ability to reach. What's the next step beyond
| arguing about the math now that this is confirmed?
| Filligree wrote:
| Then we can stop arguing about the math.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The next step is arguing about communications. Do you trust
| the unforgiving universe to respond kindly? Is it a dark
| forest trap?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Is hypothetical but the minuscule chance there isn't a single
| cell outside of earth is almost infinitely minuscule. Is like
| saying to your friend "you have a chance to win the mega
| billions lottery". It's meaningless to them because they round
| down to that you have no chance
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Let's say you found previous life in mars, will you say then
| life outside earth and mars is hypothetical? And as you keep
| finding life in bigger orbits you keep repeating it and you'd
| be treated as a crackpot lmao
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Life else where outside the solar system is all but certain, we
| just need proof, just like an extra star beyond what we can see,
| we can't see it but we know is there
| lachlan_gray wrote:
| It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes
| up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to
| become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my
| knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its
| entirety unless it's dying.
|
| Simple organisms make a bedrock for complex organisms, and while
| the complex organisms have more specific needs, they are better
| at exploring, gaining, branching out. So they also kind of make a
| nest for the simple organisms by sprawling into the void and
| finding habitable niches that simple organisms wouldn't reach on
| their own.
|
| On the time scale of technology, we began reaching out to other
| intelligences the _second_ that we could, began trying to make
| them the second we thought we could know how. It 's very
| reasonable to say that percolation is a defining property of life
| and intelligence.
|
| I also think a lot of scifi's like hyperion, neuromancer,
| foundation. In human writing of the future, it seems like the
| endgame of higher intelligence is to find or create other
| intelligences, and get closer to them. Then interesting things
| happen in the wake of that.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I think the trend towards complexity is more just due to more
| complex things being built out of less complex ones -
| complexity creates/supports greater complexity, so it's a
| natural progression.
|
| For higher level animals complexity may also be more inherently
| favorable since it supports a more customized environmental
| "fit", and helps in the predator-prey arms race.
| alphazard wrote:
| Yeah this is it. It's very unlikely to see something which
| cannot be decomposed into similar parts come into existence.
| Something highly complex _and_ irreducible.
|
| But simple things are likely to come into existence. So given
| that we see complicated things, we should assume that they
| are reducible, and that they came from simpler things. This
| creates the appearance of a "trend" as you say. But it's
| really that the complicated things couldn't exist before and
| now they can.
|
| Another effect is that it's possible to be more fit (in the
| Darwinian sense) when you are more complicated. The fittest
| system with complexity n is <= the fitness of a system with
| complexity >n. The rate at which things are destroyed is
| inversely proportional to their fitness (definitionally). So
| more complicated things _can be_ better at staying around.
|
| See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| Check out the work of Ilya Prigogine - he won a Nobel prize in
| the 70's for his work on self-organizing complexity. There is a
| selection force in the universe for increasing complexity,
| being driven by the dissipation of energy. When you have
| systems in non-equilibrium, there is a strong pressure to
| explore the possibility space to find ever more efficient ways
| to dissipate energy.
|
| A bacteria the size of a grain of sand dissipates much, much
| more energy than the grain of sand, and so there is a very
| strong "preference" for bacteria in this regard.
| mrkstu wrote:
| Is there already a theory for life->greater complexity
| similar to that of entropy in physics? It seems just as
| inexorable.
| bmitc wrote:
| The theory is that they are one in the same, or better to
| say that entropy is the process that drives life. In that,
| life grows in complexity in order to dissipate heat (i.e.,
| increase entropy) more efficiently.
|
| Just look at Earth. Life is incredibly complex but is
| ultimately driving everything towards dust.
| knome wrote:
| >life grows in complexity in order to dissipate heat
|
| This seems silly on the level of the anthropic principle.
|
| It's like claiming a calculator exists to use up
| electricity.
|
| We're eddies in the flow of energy from high to low
| entropy because it's free energy.
|
| We create more entropy in capturing energy than we
| capture because it's impossible not to.
|
| There's no purpose for life there. It's just where life
| lives.
| keithwhor wrote:
| > It's like claiming a calculator exists to use up
| electricity.
|
| _sighs in bitcoin_
| uoaei wrote:
| There is a minor pedantic point to make that _akshually
| heat dissipation carves channels of energy flow that look
| to us like life_ rather than the causality going in the
| other direction.
| lioeters wrote:
| > entropy is the process that drives life
|
| Depending on how you look at it, life is driven by the
| opposite of entropy. Schrodinger in his book, _What is
| Life?_ , calls it "negative entropy" or even "free
| energy".
|
| > In the 1944 book What is Life?, Austrian physicist
| Erwin Schrodinger, who in 1933 had won the Nobel Prize in
| Physics, theorized that life - contrary to the general
| tendency dictated by the second law of thermodynamics,
| which states that the entropy of an isolated system tends
| to increase - decreases or keeps constant its entropy by
| feeding on negative entropy.
|
| > The problem of organization in living systems
| increasing despite the second law is known as the
| Schrodinger paradox. This, Schrodinger argues, is what
| differentiates life from other forms of the organization
| of matter.
|
| > Schrodinger asked the question: "How does the living
| organism avoid decay?" The obvious answer is: "By eating,
| drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants)
| assimilating." While energy from nutrients is necessary
| to sustain an organism's order, Schrodinger also
| presciently postulated the existence of other molecules
| equally necessary for creating the order observed in
| living organisms:
|
| > "An organism's astonishing gift of concentrating a
| stream of order on itself and thus escaping the decay
| into atomic chaos - of drinking orderliness from a
| suitable environment - seems to be connected with the
| presence of the aperiodic solids..." We now know that
| this "aperiodic" crystal is DNA, and that its irregular
| arrangement is a form of information.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life#Negative_e
| ntr...
| bmitc wrote:
| I don't think you understand my point or what Schrodinger
| wrote. The Wikipedia synopsis of Schrodinger is unlikely
| to be accurate.
|
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-
| theory-o...
|
| https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-
| figures/ilya...
| lioeters wrote:
| Thank you, I'm familiar with the work of Ilya Prigogine,
| and the first linked article is one of my favorites that
| I've read several times. The relationship between life
| and entropy is a fascinating topic for sure.
| pizza wrote:
| You might really like the short book _What is Life?_ by
| Schrodinger, it delves into exactly that.
| forinti wrote:
| The Sun outputs 3.9 x 10^26W, but it weighs ~10^30kg, so that
| would mean 10^-4W/kg.
|
| Human beings are closer to 1W/kg at rest.
| adrianN wrote:
| Now do a lump of plutonium.
| conesus wrote:
| How did that lump of plutonium become a lump? That part
| wasn't natural.
| forinti wrote:
| Life is a great entropy accelerator.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| compared to a black hole though?
| forinti wrote:
| It might be too soon to tell. We might start creating
| them ourselves.
| mapreduce wrote:
| _" How did that lump of plutonium become a lump? That
| part wasn't natural."_
|
| Allow me to become a little philosophical but since human
| beings which are product of nature made plutonium, isn't
| the making of plutonium natural too?
|
| I mean everything that is happening in this universe is
| natural!
|
| I know the general usage of the words "artificial" for
| human-made and "natural" for everything else. But when we
| are talking at the grand scale of life and universe I
| think a human-made plutonium is as natural as bee-made
| honey.
| achierius wrote:
| Perhaps a better phrase to have used would have been "not
| prior to a complex system" -- as the lump of plutonium
| exists only because of a complex system doing its thing,
| it should be considered a consequence of the complex
| system rather than an alternative.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| To attempt to pedantically clarify, is "exists only
| because of a complex system doing its thing" not true of
| basically any pure lump of material that exists?
|
| To me, the actions of stars fusing heavy atoms and then
| those atoms ending up in lumps of material somewhere
| sounds like a pretty complex system doing its thing.
| namaria wrote:
| I love debating this with people but ultimately it's just
| playing games with semantics. The notion of artificial x
| natural is very recent and very localized. Some cultures
| would differentiate raw from cooked in a similar sense.
| But it's like talking about what is really green vs what
| is really blue. Completely circular since it depends on
| the definitions of the terms.
| jonhohle wrote:
| It's easily extendable to the animal world as well. Is a
| nest created by a bird or a den created by one of various
| mammals natural or artificial? Is a nest made by mice in
| my garage from synthetic fabrics, flexible plastics, and
| whatever plant matter it can find natural or synthetic?
|
| My wife was recently asked to make a meal for someone who
| didn't eat "processed" foods. What level of manipulation
| needs to happen before a food is "processed"? Can beans
| or rice be dried and put in a bag? Can chicken broth be
| used if it's homemade, but the chicken came from a
| commercial farm? Or is extracting broth from a chicken
| processing it?
|
| I've increasingly noticed many sub-cultures adopting odd
| definitions and interpretations of commonly used language
| with the expectation that everyone who interacts with
| their group understand their dialects. It's not really
| jargon or vernacular since the words are common to the
| language, just used to mean something different than the
| general population would understand. Similarly,
| artificial is now assumed to mean bad and natural good,
| when neither ascribe value by definition or in practice.
| namaria wrote:
| You could approach the language problem like that as
| well. Before imperial efforts in recent centuries to
| normalize languages in certain territories, there was no
| Standard French or German or Italian. Vocabulary and
| accents changed slowly across the landscape, following
| geography - places isolated diverged and places
| integrated converged. Migration, trade and conquest added
| layers of complexity to this variation.
|
| But your idea that people are failing to use Standard
| English and creating language subcultures around peculiar
| meanings of artificial/processed/chemical vs
| natural/homemade/organic is itself based on a very
| artificial distribution of language.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Which isotope? It makes quite a difference, and there's
| no "naturally occurring" with Pu.
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| Wow, that's a great way of describing this! Definitely
| noted for future use.
| epistasis wrote:
| Really brings up the difference between the energy
| density of the fusion reaction and the energy density of
| fusion plus the confinement system to enable the
| reaction!
| anticensor wrote:
| Hmm, then the challenge is to find a more efficient
| confinement for a fusion reaction.
| notfed wrote:
| This is enlightening. Has anyone posted some kind of
| comparison table somewhere?
| evanb wrote:
| The sun's power density is approximately the same as
| compost.
| drewrv wrote:
| Can you elaborate on that or drop a link that explains
| more?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Live/fresh compost creates heat as a byproduct of
| cellular metabolism during decomposition. I assume this
| is is using thermal output of this compost as a measure
| of energy.
|
| What more do you want to know.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The average American also outputs about 125W/kg if you
| include our technology, and not metabolism.
|
| US Primary energy consumption = 30 Trillion Kwh/ year [1]
|
| 30 Trillion Kwh/ year / 8760 hrs = 3.3x10^12 W (watts)
|
| 3.3x10^12 W (watts)/ 330million = 10 kW/ person
|
| 10 kW/ person / 80kg = 125 W/kg
|
| https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
| echelon wrote:
| So we really are batteries for the Matrix.
|
| Joking aside, this comparison is really beautiful.
| WaxProlix wrote:
| So we're all agents of Entropy, spinning our circles until we
| die all in the service of heat death? I don't like it!
| mordechai9000 wrote:
| As someone said about thermodynamics: You can't win, you
| can't break even, and you must play the game. (Source
| unknown)
| namaria wrote:
| I don't understand this view at all. We are what we are.
| Entropy is a concept in our mind and heat death is a very
| particular phenomenon that depends on the systems
| experiencing it being very specifically defined in ways
| that the Universe cannot be.
|
| We are. Descartes had the right idea. The experience of
| consciousness is irreducible. To say "we are atoms
| thinking" and variations thereof is utterly meaningless.
| All words and concepts used for such word play is dependent
| on the experience of human consciousness. They don't exist
| independently. Consciousness is the only thing we can posit
| that has independent existence. Everything else is just a
| concept created by a conscious being.
|
| It's like the tree falling in the forest with no one to
| hear it. A universe without consciousness experiencing it
| really exists? Existence is a property of consciousness. We
| can't conceive of things that are not experienced, by
| definition. Even if we imagine a dead universe with just
| energy and no consciousness, that is an image that exists
| inside of a conscious mind.
| dvt wrote:
| > Existence is a property of consciousness.
|
| Kant would vehemently disagree. Not that I'm a Kantian,
| but he makes some pretty good points. So I think there's
| a lot of work here that needs to be done to make your
| argument stronger.
| namaria wrote:
| I'm not into winning debates. I just find interesting
| that conscious beings think they can imagine the absence
| of consciousness. For us consciousness is the fundamental
| reality.
|
| Furthermore I find the verbosity of German philosophy
| nearly unbearable, to be honest.
| zoogeny wrote:
| You say: "We can't conceive of things that are not
| experienced, by definition"
|
| I mean, you probably don't even realize that this view is
| influenced by Kant. You are giving a very poor retread of
| 200+ year old German idealism.
|
| For example, from the Wikipedia article on Critique of
| Pure Reason [1], Kant's major work: In the preface to the
| first edition, Kant explains that by a "critique of pure
| reason" he means a critique "of the faculty of reason in
| general, in respect of all knowledge after which it may
| strive independently of all experience"
|
| I think it is fair to criticize his prose but it isn't
| like you don't have access to well over 200 years of
| commentary and follow-ups to one of the most famous and
| important philosophers within the Western tradition. For
| a gentle introduction I suggest this video [2] (42
| minutes) where Geoffrey Warnock (at the time the Vice
| Chancellor at Oxford) provides an overview of Kant's
| ideas.
|
| It is also fair to disagree with Kant, but it is pretty
| obvious when you are talking about the subject he
| dominates while having no experience with his work. The
| reason he is so famous is that he had very compelling
| things to say on this very subject.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason
|
| 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlEMkAkGS1I
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > Not that I'm a Kantian, but he makes some pretty good
| points
|
| It is even debatable what points he really made. As
| always in philosophy.
| calf wrote:
| That is mind blowing! It reminds me of Conway and Wolfram's
| automata theories although perhaps those models did not
| emphasize the energy aspect of it.
| manmal wrote:
| Very interesting. Do you have an intuition for why there is
| selection pressure towards energy dissipation?
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| My current intuition goes something like this:
|
| Energy MUST flow. No matter how energy is captured and
| stored, there is a pressure for it to continue moving.
|
| The movement of energy means that matter is always moving,
| and new configurations are always being "discovered."
|
| Some configurations allow for energy to flow more easily,
| and when one of those configurations is "discovered" the
| movement of energy keeps that configuration in place. I
| think it's literally a strange attractor from chaos theory.
|
| Areas of stable energy flow create correlations across
| space time that allow for more complex correlations to
| emerge.
| rileyphone wrote:
| Here's an interesting network-focused view as to why that
| might be: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/
| rspb.2012.286...
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| Sorry if this question is answered elsewhere in this
| post's replies, but would you say that matter can be
| viewed as 'captured' energy, or energy at rest?
| nyssos wrote:
| > matter can be viewed as 'captured' energy, or energy at
| rest?
|
| No, matter isn't 'captured' energy any more than it's
| 'captured' mass or momentum. Energy is a quantity, not a
| substance.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Tweak your intuition: energy IS motion. When things are
| not moving, there is no energy. When there is energy,
| things are moving.
| hughesjj wrote:
| I love it. Was susskind inspired by this at all with his
| complexity=action (duality) [1] hypothesis?
|
| Theres a bunch of lectures of him on YouTube going off about
| how complexity increases asymptotically greater than entropy
| in a black hole, but I need to refresh myself on the lecture.
| Disclosure: I'm an idiot, and may be spewing nonsense
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA-duality
| jamesblonde wrote:
| You forgot to mention that Prigogine's model includes a
| system boundary. Within the system, the 2nd law of
| thermodynamics no longer holds - the system does not tend
| towards entropy, as the system ingests energy and exports
| entropy.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Put in Prigogine's terms: the system is not at, and does
| not reach, equilibrium (the state that most other chemical
| science tends to assume).
| bloopernova wrote:
| I absolutely adore the simplicity behind this: Energy must
| balance, so it flows from high concentrations to lower
| concentrations. Things that help that flow are selected for.
|
| From that springs _everything_ we are. Utterly amazing to me
| that from a gradient plus some random chemicals plus time
| equals humans, sex, violence, loss, birth, love, games,
| music, and so much more.
|
| All just to help the earth cool down a little bit faster.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Absolutely none of this follows
| ajuc wrote:
| So where's the bacteria outcompeting moon dust?
|
| Theories which make life inevitable are inherently shaky
| because we have 1 sample.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I think it was a Greg Bear novel, but a line from it struck me
| as insightful... paraphrased badly, "even evolution is
| evolving".
| Balgair wrote:
| Nit-pick:
|
| > It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always
| goes up
|
| Depending (heavily) on how we define complexity, this is not
| always true. _If_ we define complexity as the number of genes
| an organism has (a big if there), then we see that evolutionary
| pressure will often get rid of genes to improve fitness. This
| is somewhat common in bacteria and other 'small' organisms
| that are in 'stable' environments, but can happen even in
| 'higher' lifeforms (Sorry, I can't seem to remember the paper
| on this, but I vaguely recall it had something to do with
| jellyfish. Again, sorry!)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| > It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always
| goes up.
|
| Sounds like observer bias.
|
| In terms of number of individuals, the vast vast majority of
| life on this planet is single cell prokaryotes, and always has
| been. And in terms of total bio-mass only plants exceed them
| but that's just because of how plants work (cover the surface
| with bio-solar-panels)
|
| Both bacteria and archaea haven't substantially changed in
| 3.5-4 billion years. They swap genes as needed, and drop them
| when they're too costly and unneeded. And they're dominant, and
| _everywhere_
|
| They were here since just a few hundred million years (or less)
| after the earth formed. And when conditions on the planet
| become more hostile again, in the long run it could be the case
| that eukaryotes are just a historical blip (and a fluke, to
| boot).
|
| And if there's something we recognize as life out there beyond
| earth... it's likely to look like prokaryotes. The galaxy might
| be swimming in that kind of thing.
|
| There is a strong philosophical/ideological bias in our culture
| to see the world in terms of "progress"; a teleological bias,
| seeing the universe as proceeding in stages towards some order.
| It just so happens we almost always seem to define this
| progress as "inevitably" leading to ... us, or "beyond" us into
| whatever fantasy for the future is laying dormant in the
| present. It feels remarkably pre-Copernican.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Another cool perspective is that simple organisms evolved to
| coordinate with each other to build complex organisms that
| could protect the simple organisms in hostile environments they
| might not / would take longer to explore. Think about all the
| gut bacteria that survives in humanity during reproduction and
| viruses and bacteria that invade and hitch rides. You can view
| humans as the life form or you can view the bacteria within us
| as the life form and humans are the organic machine they've
| constructed and control (eg look at how the gut/brain
| connection can effect your mood and decision making without you
| even being conscious to it)
| pocketarc wrote:
| I think that is a far more fun way of looking at it!
|
| But the bacteria aren't the whole story - we also have our
| own cells, all doing their thing and all participating (even
| if bacteria in us are -also- participating). We're just
| groups of trillions of cells all working together to keep
| themselves alive and reproducing.
|
| And then we go work together with other blobs of trillions of
| cells, just to further that goal: survival of the cells.
|
| These groups of cells that started working together many,
| many billions of generations ago, are now looking at space
| exploration, colonising other planets, and wondering if there
| are other big groups of cells on other planets.
|
| There's no way they'd have gotten there if they'd kept living
| alone as single-celled organisms.
|
| That's fun to think about.
| lurker616 wrote:
| So each of us is basically an AGI for the tiny cells
| RyEgswuCsn wrote:
| > It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always
| goes up.
|
| I feel this is only the case because the ecosystem keeps
| receiving useful/low-entropy energy inputs from the Sun.
| tivert wrote:
| > It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always
| goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally
| seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting
| that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose
| complexity in its entirety unless it's dying.
|
| I think that's a biased take. Complex life may be better at
| exploiting a more table environment, but too much disruption
| can kill it. "Less complex" life seems able to adapt more
| quickly to more extreme changes (e.g. the much greater
| diversity of bacterial metabolism). Extinction events are
| inevitable, and environmental disruption will inevitably become
| more and more challenging until everything dies (though it may
| take a billion years), and during that time I think the trend
| will be for complexity to decrease.
|
| So ultimately, I think you're overgeneralizing one phase.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| > It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always
| goes up.
|
| A lot of lifeforms evolve to be more simple, not more complex
| -- I think what you have is sort of a distribution of
| complexity, and as life continues to evolve, the upper bound
| keeps getting pushed up as some organisms push the boundary of
| complexity, but I don't think it's at all true that in general
| life involves to be more complex.
| calamari4065 wrote:
| Single-celled organisms are almost infinitely more complex
| than, say a self-replicating RNA molecule. That again is
| vastly more complex than a protein or an amino acid.
| Similarly, a human is nearly infinitely more complex than a
| single-celled organism.
|
| Evolution causes organisms to fill an ecological niche.
| Simple niches for simple organisms will always exist, and
| simple life will _always_ exist, even as the upper bounds of
| organic complexity trend unerringly upward.
|
| Life tends toward complexity, but that doesn't obviate the
| need for simple organisms.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Arguably, viruses exist by shedding as much complexity as
| possible. Trim their genome to the absolute minimum which can
| still propagate.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Which has some analogy to computer viruses (specially in
| simulated environments where they are generated through
| optimization algorithms, rather than being engineered by an
| human software developer)
| 3rd3 wrote:
| As others have noted, it is more about the maximum
| complexity increasing than mean or median. Simple
| structures keep existing as long as they have their niche,
| and a human's niche is not (yet) that of viruses.
|
| This also reminds of Gall's law that complex systems evolve
| from simpler ones.
|
| You can also see it in neural nets, where larger ones have
| a higher spatiotemporal resolution and can do more complex
| things.
|
| More model capacity allows to model the environment and
| self more accurately which allows to outperform other
| structures in negentropy consumption often at the cost of
| the other structures (zero sum).
|
| This exerts selection pressure toward increasing
| complexity.
|
| That also largely explains group and country disparities.
|
| I am not sure that non-evolving things really fit into the
| same pattern. A burning fire does not necessarily displace
| inert matter, nor did it arise from competition.
|
| Physics and chemistry are more fractal-like possibly the
| result of enumeration of all computational structures (see
| Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis or Wolfram's
| ideas on the computational universe). Not fractal-like in
| terms of self-similarity (although there is some at
| different scales), but fractal-like in terms of chaotic
| complexity like a pseudorandom number generator but with
| more rule-like structures in between. Wolfram also
| classified such computational patterns.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| The maximum complexity increases, but the average complexity?
| Bacteria outnumber us.
|
| It's more that it diffuses evenly rather than having a specific
| direction.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| > complex life generally seems to become more favourable over
| time.
|
| Talk more about this, as I'm not sure how you are arriving at
| this conclusion... it feels a bit like when people talk about
| evolution being in some way directed as opposed to just
| _being_.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| Evolution is "directed" towards the exploitation of free
| energy, inevitably producing increasingly complex niche
| methods of obtaining and dissipating energy.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Two reliable effects predict runaway complexity for any
| initially simple life form in a non-trivial environment.
|
| 1) BOOT STRAPPING COMPLEXITY: _Non-trivial_ static environment:
| Something simple is rarely the global efficiency optimum in a
| non-trivial environment. There is nothing trivial about
| chemistry and the myriad of terrains created by physics in the
| non-living world. So simple living things, in competition,
| quickly get more complex.
|
| 2) ACCELERATING COMPLEXITY: _Dynamic_ environment: In a
| competitive ecosystem of continually diversifying life forms,
| the ecosystem gets more complex, so competing in the ecosystem
| both enables and requires more complexity.
|
| The exponential increase in complexity produces qualitatively
| new modes of complexity leveraging beyond initial resources:
| such as specialization, food chains, parasitical strategies,
| mutual or cyclical symbioses, discarded products that become
| new resources, colonization of new environments and energy
| sources, flexible behaviors based on conditions, greater
| utilization of existing environments and resources, cooperation
| within multi-cell colonies, specialization and reproductive
| coordination within cell colonies (creatures), communication
| and coordination between similar and different life forms, tool
| use, tool creation, environment shaping, anticipation and
| planning, curiosity driven learning, aggregation and
| recombination of knowledge, resource trading systems, systems
| to promote positive sum interactions, and suppress negative sum
| interactions, engineering, invention, science, automation, etc.
|
| --
|
| TLDR: Non-trivial environments provide initial opportunities
| for complexity to improve efficiency. Complexity feedback in
| ecosystems exponentially accelerates further complexity.
| Exponential growth of life's complexity on Earth shows no signs
| of relenting.
|
| Qualitatively new forms of complexity keep appearing. Conscious
| intelligence, culture, technology and automation are more
| continuations than breaks from this trend.
| colordrops wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
| alanbernstein wrote:
| I think you're describing the _maximum_ complexity of life over
| time, which is an interesting thing to think about: the life
| forms that stand out among the rest for "how far" they evolve.
|
| In terms of other measures (total biomass, long-term survival,
| short-term adaptability), the life forms that stand out,
| historically, are very different. Ants, roaches, sharks,
| bacteria.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| As entropy goes up in the universe complexity first increases
| and then decreases. And life is probably a consequence of this.
|
| Sean Carroll explains it quite well in his book The Big Picture
| and also in this video series from minute physics
|
| https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoaVOjvkzQtyZF-2VpJrxPz...
| johngossman wrote:
| Stephen Gould wrote a whole book disputing this idea that the
| complexity of life increases: "Full House: The Spread of
| Excellence from Plato to Darwin." The basic argument is that
| almost all life on Earth is still prokaryotic...the rest of us
| are just a rounding error. He wrote several books about how
| evolution was not directional, notably "Wonderful Life" and
| "Time's Arrow". I'm not completely convinced by any of these,
| but worth reading.
| svieira wrote:
| In _Count to the Eschaton_ the "grand project" is "the
| sophistication of all matter" and it's been going on since the
| beginning.
| lioeters wrote:
| > The Count to the Eschaton Sequence is a six-novel series
| written by John C. Wright.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| > It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always
| goes up.
|
| This isn't true- many things evolved to be simpler over time.
| For example, some viruses are beleived to have evolved from
| parasitic bacteria, which themselves evolved from free living
| bacteria. Many other parasites have simplified and lost the
| ability to survive without a host. You also have examples like
| many cave and underground animals losing eye sight and
| pigmentation. Also consider things like marine mammals losing
| limbs land mammals had, and many sedentary/fixed marine
| invertebrates evolving from free swimming ones.
|
| There are costs to complexity, and so organisms evolve it when
| needed, and lose it quickly when it isn't giving an
| advantage... there is not an "arrow of complexity" that only
| moves one direction.
| sfink wrote:
| My first reaction was: wat? Isn't that only from the
| perspective of a relatively complex organism? Life constantly
| explores in all the directions it can, so it's no wonder that
| one frontier of that exploration is towards increasing
| complexity. And there are natural limits to decreasing
| complexity. (Though those limits are beyond what we would call
| "life". You don't need to be capable of reproduction if you can
| borrow a host's capability. We're all just host mechanisms for
| the parasitic reproduction of Pollan's corn, Adams's digital
| watches, and bad analogies.)
|
| Maybe that's what the abstract referred to as "the Theory of
| the Adjacent Possible"? I've only read the abstract.
|
| But your argument of _ecosystem_ complexity is totally valid.
| Though I guess if an ecosystem decreases in complexity, then it
| has to end up in a different type of simplicity than it was the
| last time it was there, because otherwise you already know that
| it evolves out of that spot (assuming some amount of
| determinism).
|
| Temporarily, though, this can and does happen. Invasive species
| often obliterate a lot of complexity, presumably until either
| their weaknesses are discovered through the very changing
| conditions that allowed the natives to flourish in the first
| place, or until they evolve complexity of their own.
|
| There's another way to derive increasing complexity from a
| small number of laws, though. There are multiple resources and
| multiple ways to access them. Optimizing for any one of those
| results in overspecializing and becoming less fit for accessing
| most of the others. There's no one best answer that works for
| everything. You always have a delicate balance between
| overgeneralizing and overspecializing, and the area between
| those provides a lot of different ecological niches, and even
| more if you look at the battle stretched out over time. (The
| configurations are unstable; you could have a thousand species
| optimized for particular resources that get clobbered by a
| generalist that poisons the specialists, then the energy
| required by the poisoners makes them lose out to generalist
| nonpoisoners, which enables specialization again, not to
| mention evolved immunity... the wheel goes round and round,
| picking up crud as it rolls.)
| tsunamifury wrote:
| There are some excellent if controversial theoretical
| explanations for this in Assembly Theory
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I would say we have a complex organism bias though, really the
| most successful life is simple, more than 90% of earth's
| biomass is plants, ants, fungi, bacteria (obviously some of
| those are more complex than others, but none of them are
| posting on HN quite).
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Sounds like the complexity of life follows a power law
| distribution, where most of it is simple to moderately
| complex, but a few species are orders of magnitude more
| complex than the vast majority. Eg, the vast majority of
| complexity among living organisms derives from just a few
| species.
| EGreg wrote:
| Hey this dude comes to mind. Anyone remember him? Whatever came
| of his theories?
|
| I found them to be implausible due to the implications they'd
| have on the Drake equation
|
| https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...
|
| https://xkcd.com/384/
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Reading the introductory paragraph to the paper, it sounds like a
| rehash of Kaufmann's (very good) book "At Home in the Universe",
| which at this point is almost 30 years old. Not sure what this
| paper adds, but will read it to find out.
|
| The thesis of Kaufmann's book is that the emergence of life,
| given supporting conditions (variety of source chemicals in
| environment, sources of energy, maybe water/mixing) is all but
| inevitable (hence life being "at home" in the universe) rather
| than being some rare event.
|
| The reasoning is that when these preconditions are met there will
| be a variety of chemical chain reactions occurring where the
| product of one reaction is used as the input to the next, and
| eventually reaction chains that include products that act as
| catalysts for parts of the reaction chain. These types of
| reaction can be considered as a primitive metabolism - consuming
| certain environmental chemicals and producing others useful to
| the metabolism.
|
| From here to proto-cells and the beginning of evolution all it
| takes is some sort of cell-like container which (e.g.) need be
| nothing more than than something like froth on the seashore,
| based out of whatever may be floating on the water surface.
| Initial "reproduction" would be based on physical agitation (e.g
| wave action) breaking cells and creating new ones.
|
| Different locations would have different micro-environments with
| different locally occurring reaction chains and
| "proliferation/survival of the fittest" would be the very
| beginning of evolution, as those reactions better able to utilize
| chemical sources and support their own structure/metabolism would
| become more widespread.
|
| Anyway, a good book and plausible thesis in general (one could
| easily adapt the specifics from seashore to deep sea thermal
| vents etc).
| libeclipse wrote:
| Did you see the authors of the paper?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Yes - that's what I meant. Kaufmann rehashing his old work
| (but presumably adding something to it too).
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| As soon as I see a supposed scientific paper that was typeset in
| Microsoft Word, I know it's going to be trash. It's not a perfect
| heuristic, but it's like 99%+.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| I love that this was downvoted because it's unlikely that
| anyone who downvoted it knows what scientific papers are
| actually typeset with.
|
| HN is now a hangout for PMs and wannabe nontechnical founders
| who want to feel cool.
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| This scientist is just older than LaTeX.
| jyounker wrote:
| I went I read the first few paragraphs I thought, "Is someone
| ripping off Stuart Kaufmann? He was writing about this idea
| thirty years ago." Then I read the first author: Stuart Kaufmann.
|
| For those of you following along at home, Kaufmann has been
| developing the ideas here for decades. The paper is less a "here
| is a new idea" and much more "here is a concise summary of 50
| years of work". The words and thoughts seem opaque, but this is
| case where they actually have concrete and specific meanings.
| It's worth noting too, that towards the end of the article he
| outlines experiments that could be used to falsify the theory.
|
| If you want a really hard-core dive into the ideas, then check
| out his 1993 book, "On The Origins of Order" (ISBN
| 978-0-19-507951-7).
|
| https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-order...
| jamesblonde wrote:
| Recommend reading along with order out of chaos and anything
| from Prigogine in the 80s (not his last book).
| madmountaingoat wrote:
| To my laymen brain this seems very similar to Lee Cronin's
| Assembly theory. Curious to understand more about the difference.
| zhynn wrote:
| My snarky take is: Assembly theory is testable, this one isn't.
| jcims wrote:
| First thing that came to my lay mind as well. Really
| interesting episode with him talking about it on Lex Fridman's
| podcast. Feels like there's something there.
| jayavanth wrote:
| Can someone eli5?
| huqedato wrote:
| tldr: the article proposes a new way to understand the origin of
| life. It combines two scientific ideas to explain how life
| emerges naturally as a part of the universe's evolution. Key
| concepts include how chemicals interact and support each other to
| create life, and the idea that life continuously explores new
| possibilities. The article challenges the traditional view of
| separating the physical and informational parts of living cells,
| suggesting a more integrated approach to studying life's
| beginnings and development.
| johngossman wrote:
| There is a whole genre of these, starting with (as mentioned in
| the paper's introduction) "What is Life?" by Schrodinger. I've
| been idly working my way through a bunch of them, including
| Monod's "Chance and Necessity" (dated but excellent), Nick Lane's
| whole series of books (notably "The Vital Question"), Nurse's
| "What is Life?" (good if you want to learn about yeast), Zimmer's
| "Life's Edge" (haven't finished it yet, seems good). Honestly,
| the details change, and the emphasis of each author, but they are
| all speculative and hand-wavey. Pre-paradigmatic. My favorite
| quote is from "Life on the Edge" by McFadden and Al-Khalili:
|
| "Biologists cannot even agree on a unique definition of life
| itself; but that hasn't stopped them from unraveling aspects of
| the cell, the double helix, photosynthesis, enzymes and a host of
| other living phenomena"
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| It's a complex topic. I think it really got kicked off with
| "What is Life?" and we've been able to build more details on it
| since then. There are many parts of the story that we know in
| incredible details. Chaos theory, information theory, non-
| equillibrium thermodynamics, complexity and emergence, auto-
| catalytic chemistry are all just parts of it, and each one are
| massive fields of study on their own.
|
| I'm not sure there will ever be a synthesis of all these things
| that creates a paradigm of some sort. There's simply too much.
| ixaxaar wrote:
| I think the complexity researchers over the years have
| created a wide range of tooling for analysing complex systems
| across a large number of domains.
|
| Consider complexity economics, computational social sciences,
| network sciences and cascading networks, evolutionary
| theories, parts of systems biology, connectomics and
| computational neuroscience etc.
|
| The Santa Fe institute has been at the forefront and has an
| amazing collections of publications in their own press. David
| krakaeur's book "Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving
| Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute" is like a 20
| year survey paper and an amazing read.
| johngossman wrote:
| Agree on "What is Life?" but recently learned that Leo
| Szilard is the first one to connect entropy and life, in a
| 1929 paper.
|
| https://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.18/notes/computation/Szi.
| ..
|
| Szilard seems to have been involved in everything.
| zukzuk wrote:
| I'd add "Into the Cool" by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan
| to that reading list.
|
| I'm pretty sure that one was originally recommended here on HN,
| so I guess I'm feeding it back into the echo chamber. But well
| worth a read!
| wanderingstan wrote:
| It's been a while, but in this vein I enjoyed Chaitin's _Toward
| a Mathematical definition of "Life"_ :
| http://home.thep.lu.se/~henrik/mnxa09/Chaitin1979.pdf
|
| Blew my mind as I started to wrap my brain around information
| theory.
| blueprint wrote:
| "life is the process from birth until death"
|
| "life is the way to make anything happen to you"
|
| without a body (via life), a consciousness cant do anything
| lutusp wrote:
| "Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the
| evolving universe? (arxiv.org)"
|
| Easily answered: * We don't know how
| consciousness comes into being, indeed we can't rigorously define
| it or unambiguously identify its presence or absence. *
| We believe we have it, but we aren't sure whether other animals
| and/or objects possess it. * Therefore, based on Occam's
| razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter possesses some
| degree of consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption.
| * The alternative would be to argue for a consciousness
| exceptionalism in "life" forms for which there is no evidence and
| many counterarguments. * Therefore it follows that ...
| wait for it ... life is not a special state of matter or energy.
| * Therefore the emergence of life doesn't represent a phase
| transition that confronts physical laws or requires an
| explanation.
| gfodor wrote:
| That's not an answer, that's an argument. Occam's Razor isn't
| like the second law of thermodynamics. It's a heuristic.
| willmadden wrote:
| The paper defines life as a chemical reaction, which is also
| a heuristic. We do not know if aspects of "life" exist
| outside of our present understanding of physics. It's great
| to claw away at the edges, but I don't think anyone can
| answer the question "what is life?" at this point.
| onetimeuse92304 wrote:
| Yes. You can't prove anything by proving it is the simplest
| explanation. The only way to prove things is to prove that it
| is _the only possible_ explanation.
|
| Occam's Razor is just a useful mind tool that helps us
| navigate the world based on the observation that _oftentimes_
| the simplest explanation tends to be what is actually
| happening.
|
| BTW lots of other logical mistakes.
| xmonkee wrote:
| I agree with the overall thrust of your argument, but I
| disagree with this one somewhat:
|
| > Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally
| assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness
| -- this is the simplest assumption.
|
| An even simpler first few steps:
|
| * We experience matter, but we aren't sure if matter exists
| outside of our experience of it
|
| * Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally
| assume that all matter exists only within our consciousness --
| this is the simplest assumption.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Is there evidence of consciousness in a rock?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| It's a reducto ad absurdum argument. Either consciousness
| only emerges in living things, or it exists in everything.
| The brain is made of tissue and tissue is made of matter,
| therefore, it exists in all mater or doesn't exist at all.
|
| I believe this is the thrust of panpsychism/panentheism.
| lukifer wrote:
| There isn't the same kind of ontological boundary in a rock,
| as there is an organism.
|
| My hunch is: there's a low-grade subjectivity/qualia to all
| of the universe, which would include the particles of the
| rock, but the rock would not experience an independent "rock-
| ness".
|
| The consciousness of organisms are perhaps more like a
| dissociative state, analogous to a gravity well of
| subjectivity, such that the qualia are concentrated inside a
| boundary (the entity that is intelligently chasing energy
| differentials), and excluding most information outside this
| boundary.
|
| The primary reason for this hunch is that "ouch" is an
| experience, rather than merely a mathematical/algorithmic
| update to a neural net (compare with artificial NN's,
| chemical feedback loops, etc). An "ouch" is not needed to
| strengthen the signal; just tilt the training feedback
| stronger as necessary (-10,000 points to "eat the berry that
| made us sick"). And it seems prohibitively expensive
| expensive to bootstrap "strange loop" subjectivity merely to
| strengthen those numbers via an "ouch".
|
| But instead, if some form of subjectivity were to pre-exist,
| Darwinian pressures would co-opt it as an efficient feedback
| loop mechanism, and then iterate until arriving at the
| "consciousness" of animals and humans (including an incentive
| to pay more attention to qualia in the organism boundary, and
| only minimally outside it)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If we scale the rock up to earth, the ontological boundary
| would be similar, so maybe the earth is conscious?
| genman wrote:
| It is also possible that your defined level of
| consciousness will reach zero at certain level of entropy.
| Or it is possible that the signal processing speed will
| decrease to the level to be effectively zero in any
| meaningful time scale.
| cameldrv wrote:
| I don't think Kauffman is making any claims about consciousness
| here. I agree that consciousness is a big mystery. Kauffman's
| theory (haven't yet read this paper, but have read a lot of his
| other work), is that self-replicating entities are essentially
| inevitable in environments that have above some level of
| chemical complexity. That chemical complexity also weakly
| implies that there is useable free energy, which is also a
| requirement for self replication.
| rileyphone wrote:
| Fwiw Kauffman has a very interesting stance on consciousness
| that he is hinting at here. Consider this recent paper [1] or
| interview [0] where he explains his thinking. Cool to see a
| respected scientist exploring areas that were previously
| looked down as quackery by academia.
|
| 0. https://youtu.be/XWbxdREQ6xM?si=t2-AywFf2cnQfAni
|
| 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030
| 32...
| kurthr wrote:
| What's interesting here is that life on earth has commonly
| defined has been around gathering negative entropy for several
| billion years (photosynthesis and the rise of oxygen for over 3
| billion) and growing exponentially on earth. That is a sizeable
| fraction of the age of the universe. Human like ancestors have
| been using fire for over a million years (based on the oxygen
| generated above), agriculture for thousands, and industry for
| hundreds.
|
| All of these are exponential increases in energy density,
| entropy generation, and negative entropy consumption. To not
| describe them as phase changes is odd. It's telling that
| economic growth over the last 4000 years (first farming and now
| industry in the last ~400) also appear to be exponential over
| several orders of magnitude. Whether there's a quick end to
| this or not is an open question, but they still look like phase
| changes. That weather is starting to be affected is equally
| telling.
|
| A conflation of consciousness with life seems weird, though. If
| ordered psuedo-crystals are life (or clay-RNA / DNA crystals)
| or even viruses are life, I don't know anyone claiming they're
| conscious. It would be like assuming life caused capitalism or
| industry, when certainly they fit very different exponential
| curves. Making arguments that industrialization (use of power
| other than human/animal work) isn't a "phase change" in economy
| would also be similarly strange.
|
| Now, whether it "confronts physical laws" or requires an
| explanation, I have no idea. They do seem to be transitions at
| least as interesting as weather on Jupiter.
|
| https://communities.springernature.com/posts/were-humans-the...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms
|
| https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/longgrow.pdf
| bsza wrote:
| > We don't know how consciousness comes into being
|
| Consciousness and life are completely different things. The
| article doesn't even mention consciousness.
|
| > Therefore it follows that ... wait for it ... life is not a
| special state of matter or energy
|
| It is special in the sense that it's remarkably complex e.g.
| compared to a mineral. It is not special in the sense that it
| obeys the same laws as a mineral.
|
| > Therefore the emergence of life doesn't represent a phase
| transition that confronts physical laws or requires an
| explanation
|
| No one claims it confronts physical laws. In my understanding,
| the article states: life may emerge naturally as molecules bump
| into each other, combine and eventually become complex enough
| that self-sustaining/self-replicating systems can come into
| being by chance. This process might be deterministic enough
| that it happens everywhere roughly at the same time (on a
| cosmological time scale).
| nox101 wrote:
| > Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally
| assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness
| -- this is the simplest assumption.
|
| Plenty of things don't follow that. Heat something up it gets
| hotter but at some point it tips the scale and burns. Cool down
| water and it gets colder but at some point it hits a threshold
| and freezes. 1000s of similar examples. Put a bunch of hydrogen
| together and not much happens. Put enough and it becomes a
| star. It seems like consciousness could follow the same pattern
| and still fit occam's razor
| waynenator wrote:
| always liked the "Anthropic Cosmological Principle"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
| BurningFrog wrote:
| For something to be expected, someone must be expecting it. And
| to be able to expect things, you must be alive.
|
| This proves something, but I'm not sure what...
| yellow_lead wrote:
| "I think therefore I am"
| javajosh wrote:
| I personally believe that the origin of life started with
| something we would not recognize as such today. I imagine that it
| started with some long molecules in water and they have the
| ability to grow longer and longer. Maybe they looped around and
| the dynamics of the system meant that if they oriented toward the
| sun better they would be more numerous. Maybe if their
| composition was a little bit different they would acquire
| material from the surrounding bath more efficiently. This creates
| a gradient of success where the topmost molecules will do better
| than the bottom most molecules. Similar perturbations would allow
| them to acquire more material more efficiently in a pantomime of
| eating. Reproduction would be something as simple as breaking in
| half. This is of course a just so story, but it's one that I find
| pretty compelling. But I would like it if people thought more
| about what these early systems looked like rather than be so hand
| wavy. I think it's unlikely that any of these very early forms of
| life survive as they were consumed by subsequent generations. It
| also seems unlikely that they would form very often spontaneously
| such that we might find examples in nature. If such a form
| develops only once in a million years in a planet-wide irradiated
| bath, then we would have a huge challenge. Even simulating such a
| system to find what that structure might be. So instead I think
| we should use our imaginations and imagine what the simplest
| possible system could possibly work in that circumstance to
| bootstrap life.
| ruffrey wrote:
| Related, lately I have been enthralled with the work of Michael
| Levin at Tufts. He studies things like goal directed behavior of
| cells and systems of cells. Here is an intro to his work:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3lsYlod5OU
| eye-robot wrote:
| Interesting (side note) as I read all the commentary here: As
| people (obviously) are reacting to the particular "group
| psychology", or personality or culture here within HN, many
| commentators are heavily apologizing for not having specific
| links or attributions available. And I understand why now: Too
| many neurotic or OCD (or selfishly angry) individuals who will
| downvote in a heartbeat if the comment isn't to their supreme
| liking. So, to prove that point, this comment will (most likely)
| get downvoted into oblivion. I like free commentary sections that
| don't show off "commentary powers". I once asked a simple
| innocent question and the downvotes simply drove me to stop
| trusting anyone here... really sad, since I am an intelligent
| person with feelings and with curiosity and VALID opinions. Sorry
| that this rubs the weird people the wrong way. Just sayin'
| maksimur wrote:
| I've noticed the same thing but I don't remember it being so
| prevalent up until a few years ago. This is sad and as you
| rightly suggest it stifles curious conversations. I had to
| self-censor myself a few times already.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| I stopped reading the article at "Life is a double miracle." As
| is so often the case, discussion here on HN is more compelling
| than the article.
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| There is a lot of work to be done inorder to fuse the gaps
| between physics and biology.
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