[HN Gopher] Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex
___________________________________________________________________
Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex
Author : konradx
Score : 136 points
Date : 2025-04-14 01:25 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| gomijacogeo wrote:
| 99.9999999...% of 'everything' in the universe simply falls down
| a gravity gradient to be crushed into simple oblivion.
| manmal wrote:
| Isn't that actually also in favor of building up more
| complexity?
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| I remember reading somewhere that _maybe_ the purpose of life is
| to increase entropy in the universe. If that is true and we haven
| 't found any sound evidence of life elsewhere, I don't know.
| justinator wrote:
| It tracks, though "attaining a higher state of entropy" is just
| what Universes generally do it seems, given our n of 1
| Universes we've started to evaluate.
|
| Though, I'm not sure if life is the best at it, when compared
| to say a _black hole_. Some smart apes burning off fossil fuels
| seems pretty insignificant in comparison -- or even seeing what
| our own Sun does in a few seconds.
|
| File that under, "The Earth will be fine in the long run, it's
| humans that are f'd" George Carlin pov. Maybe when we start
| building Death Stars (plural)
| kmoser wrote:
| Where did you read this? "Purpose" is a very loaded word. If
| life has any purpose at all, it's to reproduce and propagate
| one's genes. Additional entropy just sounds like an inevitable
| side-effect of that.
| firecall wrote:
| Agreed about purpose being a loaded term.
|
| It's my, somewhat lazy, philosophical opinion, that there
| isn't any purpose and there doesn't need to be one.
|
| I don't see why the universe would need a purpose for
| anything. Things are what they. Things changing state.
| Entropy.
|
| I see reproduction as more of built in motivation to our
| system than a purpose as such. But that's semantics, and my
| purpose in life is not to argue about words! ;-)
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| Could be. Could also be that reproduction and propagation is
| the inevitable side effect of that, no? We cant dissipate
| energy when we're dead.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Rather a way to accomplish that. Life reproducing in order
| to accelerate the generation of entropy, in other words.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| "to reproduce and populate its genes" feels like a better fit
| for the purpose of an organism.
|
| If you subscribe to the big bang theory (and the idea that
| the purpose of a system is what it does), then the universe's
| purpose is to walk a path from low entropy to high entropy.
| Of what use is life, in such an endeavor? Well, life tends to
| seek out bits of stuck energy (food/fuel) and release it
| (metabolism/economy)--moving the universe further along on
| its path.
|
| This gives a sort of answer to the question: "why bother have
| live at all?" And so I think the entropy purpose makes sense
| --moreso than just having it just be a side effect. Nobody
| will ever be absolutely right or wrong about such things
| (purposes), but they're handy to have around sometimes.
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| Stafford Beers, " _The Purpose of a System is What it Does
| (POSIWID)_ ", very hot right now..
|
| https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-
| purpo...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wh
| a...
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| When Beers says:
|
| > According to the cybernetician the purpose of a system
| is what it does...
|
| The "according to the cybernetician" part makes it pretty
| clear that we're now entering some kind of abstract space
| that cares not for the stated intentions of humans. It
| seems that what's "very hot right now" is to ignore the
| first part.
|
| I think it's an especially reasonable position to take
| when the system in question has no designer to disagree
| with anyhow.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Not necessarily. Cybernetics was specifically the study
| of systems, so that part can also be taken as an appeal
| to the experts in the matter.
|
| Generally the point of this observation is specifically
| about human systems, either designed or evolved. The
| observation stems from the fact that it's (a) impossible
| to ascertain what the _true_ intention of a human that
| designed a system was (they may be publicly lying about
| it, or even privately, it even to themselves), and (b)
| any complex enough system has been influenced and
| possibly "warped" by many more than one human, so the
| original unique intention, whatever it was, isn't the
| sole guiding principle behind it.
|
| So, if analyzing a system, rather than trying to dig into
| its creators' history or anything like that, it's best to
| just look at what the system is doing and consider that
| its true current purpose.
| hnbad wrote:
| > we're now entering some kind of abstract space that
| cares not for the stated intentions of humans
|
| But that's the thing about systems: they may involve
| humans but they don't necessarily reflect the intentions
| of the individual humans involved. Even when a system is
| created with a stated intent (i.e. for a stated purpose)
| that doesn't mean it will actually behave in a way that
| aligns with this intent. Logically you then shouldn't
| take the human intent into consideration when analyzing a
| system's actual effects and outcomes (except to determine
| whether it aligns with those but that's secondary).
|
| IOW the purpose of a system (i.e. "what it exists for")
| can be different from the purpose for which it was
| created (i.e. "what it is meant to do"). I guess
| "purpose" in this case is an overloaded term because the
| former more uses a meaning that more closely aligns with
| "function" (like the function of a predator in an
| ecosystem may be controlling prey population but that
| doesn't suggest intent nor design) and the latter uses a
| meaning that more closely aligns with "intent" (like
| during wildfires controlled burns are performed with the
| intent of stopping the spread of the wildfire).
|
| But I'd say it's a stretch to apply this to statements
| like "the purpose of organisms is to increase entropy"
| because that strongly implies intent rather than function
| (because the latter could also be simply expressed as
| "organisms create entropy").
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| POSIWID is usually the end result of asking some basic
| questions about "A System": -Has the
| System taken (on) a mind of its own? -What
| does It want? -How do we know what It wants?
|
| For organisms, sometimes just asking it directly can give
| more useful answers (or surprises,YMMV)
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| What I find compelling is how it works at low and high
| levels. Low level because we dissipate energy just by being
| a living creature. And the high level because as you said,
| we as a civilization can't seem to escape it, and want to
| use pockets of low entropy like mineral veins and fuels.
| Until all is spent i guess. You don't mention how
| unsympathetic that purpose is, though. At that point any
| purpose you make for yourself is better than that one even
| if it's true.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| > At that point any purpose you make for yourself is
| better than that one even if it's true.
|
| Absolutely, let's not let thermodynamics be the final
| word on the topic.
|
| But suppose we did... To anybody who would cite this as a
| reason to drill more oil, I'd say that part of the
| equation is that we must also survive. In 10k years there
| will still be plenty of useful sunlight falling on the
| planet. Ideally we'll be around then, harnessing it to
| throw really great parties or whatever. If we aren't
| choosy about our fuel sources in the near term we might
| not be around to continue at this purpose in the long
| term.
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure. You'd still need to mine for the
| batteries and the rest of the infrastructure.... And then
| plastics also dissipate into micro and nanoplastics
| possibly robbing life of vitality. But again, this
| involves predicting things that never happened yet, so I
| might be very wrong for reasons I don't consider.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Oh I'm not trying to make any claims about any type of
| energy infrastructure in particular.
|
| I'm just saying that even if the game is merely to
| contribute as much as possible to this Big Bang that
| we're living in, we're still gonna lose if we focus on
| short term gains a the expense of our survival.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Stop it. My eyes can only roll so much.
| prabhu-yu wrote:
| Can life evolve to slow down the process of increasing
| entropy? For ex: Sun is throwing energy in space. What if
| life tries to store it and use it only when it needs? Has
| the sunlight gone into space (without being captured by
| fossilized life), it would have thinly spread out in
| universe(high entropy, low energy density). But plants and
| humans (solar cells) capturing it to create fossil fules or
| create some infrastructure... Is it not life going against
| this theory? Or is it just intermidiate step of life which
| eventually (life will) blast all energy in short period of
| time at the end like an expontial system does?
| kouru225 wrote:
| Pretty sure this is what Schrodingers opinion is in his book
| "what is life?" But I haven't read it. Maybe OP got it from
| that
| mjan22640 wrote:
| Reproduction is not really a purpose. What makes copies of
| itself, happens to persist.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I have lost the book, but I think I read this in "What is Life?
| And Other Scientific Essays" by Erwin Schrodinger. If I recall,
| it was one of the "Other Scientific Essays."
| nayuki wrote:
| I read somewhere that life is more efficient at dissipating
| energy and faster at increasing entropy than non-living
| physical/chemical phenomena. Citation needed.
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| https://www.amazon.nl/Every-Life-Fire-Thermodynamics-
| Explain...
| floatrock wrote:
| Right, it's less about the _purpose_ of life (which implies a
| directive force) and more that a _characteristic_ of life is
| it 's an emergent complexity that finds more efficient ways
| of increasing entropy.
|
| It gets a bit blurry when you start to substitute "life" for
| any "complex cosmological system" though...
| robocat wrote:
| Surely you mean accelerate entropy.
|
| I presume the end-state of entropy would be the same (excluding
| ways to escape the universe).
| XorNot wrote:
| I mean purpose is assigning too much agency, but it's
| relatively easy to show cells are entropy pumps - they survive
| by producing a lot more entropy in their environment then is
| recovered from dying.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| I think it was from Sean Caroll's book The Big Picture.
|
| The statement is a category error, but that criticism distracts
| from the very valuable insight he does provide regarding
| entropy, life and complexity.
|
| He did a series on minutephysics explaining it quite well,
| worth a watch. He does explain why complexity increases as
| entropy increases (with some additional qualification).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoaVOjvkzQtyZF-2VpJrx...
| tiborsaas wrote:
| We are only relatively recently have good enough tooling to
| even talk about discovering bio- and technosignatures in the
| atmosphere of exoplanets. I'm really hoping that we will find
| some undeniable evidence in my lifetime.
| perrygeo wrote:
| POSIWID. Life on earth's primary "purpose" if observed from
| space would be to dissipate low-entropy solar radiation, using
| it to build temporary structures out of carbon.
|
| It is puzzling why life isn't more common. Perhaps dissipative
| self-organizing structures are everywhere - stars, solar
| systems and galaxies themselves maintain their order by
| dissipating energy. They just don't look like "life" to us.
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| I'm fairly sure this is already in the usual canon of statistical
| mechanics.
|
| "When one compares a hotplate with and without a Benard cell
| apparatus on top, there is an overall increase in entropy as
| energy passes through the system as required by the second law,
| because the increase in entropy in the environment (at the heat
| sink) is greater than the decreases in entropy that come about by
| maintaining gradients within the Benard cell system."
| gsf_emergency wrote:
| The abstract heresy innuendo'd here seems to be about an
| increase in _global_ (aka universal) "complexity"*
|
| (Think: no heat death!)
|
| Related to another heresy understated by qmag just this week:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43665831
|
| In that case, qmag didn't (dare to?) shout loud enough that the
| para-particles are globally ?distinguishable..
|
| That's like a very restricted version of TFA's claim though..
|
| Another take on the issue:
|
| https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=762
|
| *I don't want to say "entropy" because it's not clear to many
| folks, _including experts_ , whether entropy is uh,
| "correlated" or "anticorrelated" with complexity.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| > "correlated" or "anticorrelated" with complexity.
|
| Also the value of entropy has different signs in
| thermodynamics and computer science for example. Not helpful
| either...
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| The law of increasing complexity holds at least for the software
| that I write, so yeah--plausible...
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Software complexity can decrease though. Very, very unlikely,
| but there is the possibility of the 12 year old kid from the
| internet that does a better job than you despite your hard work
| and long professinal career.
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| I'm absolutely positive that software complexity _can_
| decrease and in so far my post was not entirely serious. I
| have multiple instances at my hand where re-writing existing
| libraries with a better focus on simplicity, patterns better
| suited for the job, more stringent APIs and so on all
| contribute to produce new versions of software that are
| ~about as capable as the old version but internally much
| simpler. However I feel that when I just go on building on
| and on without tearing down entire edifices of code once in a
| while, software tends to become inscrutable, hard to maintain
| and hard to extend.
| petre wrote:
| Douglas Adams was right all along then.
|
| _" There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers
| exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will
| instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more
| bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states
| that this has already happened."_
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| Fancier but less humorous take by "experts" (including Goedel):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_collapse
| fpoling wrote:
| The thing that is often missed in debates about entropy and
| Universe is that the classical notion on entropy is not
| compatible with General Relativity. Richard Tolman almost 100
| years ago proposed an extension that was compatible.
|
| One of the consequences of that extension was a possibility of a
| cyclic universe. On expansion one sees that classically defined
| entropy increases but then it will decrease on contraction.
|
| These days that work is pretty much forgotten, but still it
| showed that with GR heat dearth of the universe was not the only
| option.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Heat death was never the only option in GR. The field equations
| always allowed for a big crunch or a big rip.
| fpoling wrote:
| Yes, but that implies that in GR entropy or at least the
| value based on the classical definition can decrease.
|
| So apparent increase in complexity can be attributed to
| gravity.
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| Sean Carroll today's go-to person for GR has been working
| at popularizing these ideas (for more than 10 years(!))
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.6903
|
| > _For example, our universe lacked complex structures at
| the Big Bang and will also lack them after black holes
| evaporate and particles are dispersed._
|
| See my comment below for link to Scott's preview.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| There is
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology
|
| If I had to bet money on it, I would say it's right, especially
| in light of things like this: https://phys.org/news/2025-03-ai-
| image-recognition-universe....
| hliyan wrote:
| Tried reading the paper [1]. I understand the authors are
| academics, which is why I'm surprised the paper reads like a
| layman's attempt at a contributing to a "theory of everything",
| or at best, an inquiry written by a 18th century European
| philosopher of science.
|
| - "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate
| phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of
| nature" - what exactly is a "conceptual equivalence"? You mean
| models? Unifying disparate observations into models is basic
| science. Not sure why it is highlighted here as some important
| insight.
|
| - "The laws of classical physics emerged as efforts to provide
| comprehensive, predictive explanations of phenomena in the
| macroscopic world" - followed by a laymen's listing of physical
| laws, then goes on to claim "conspicuously absent is a law of
| increasing "complexity.""
|
| - then a jumble of examples including gravitation, stellar
| evolution, mineral evolution and biological evolution
|
| - this just feels like a slight generalization of evolution:
| "Systems of many interacting agents display an increase in
| diversity, distribution, and/or patterned behavior when numerous
| configurations of the system are subject to selective pressure."
|
| At this point, I gave up.
|
| [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120
| bubblyworld wrote:
| I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy.
| This is as true now as it was in the 18th century. If you look
| at any thinker on the edge of human understanding you'll find
| something similar (e.g. I was reading Michael Levin's stuff on
| bioelectricity recently and it also has a heavy dose of
| philosophy).
|
| I don't really have an issue with any of the points you raised
| - why do they bother you?
|
| The interesting stuff is the discussion about "functional
| information" later in the paper, which is their proposed
| quantitative measure for understanding the evolution of
| complexity (although it seems like early stages for the
| theory).
|
| It's "just" a slight generalisation of the ideas of evolution
| but it _applies to nonbiological systems_ and they can make
| _quantitative predictions_. If it turns out to be true then
| (for me) that is a pretty radical discovery.
|
| I'm looking forward to seeing what can be demonstrated
| experimentally (the quanta article suggests there is some
| evidence now, but I haven't yet dug into it).
| haswell wrote:
| > _I think speculative science always starts out as
| philosophy. This is as true now as it was in the 18th
| century._
|
| Indeed, and Natural Philosophy was the precursor to what we
| now call Science.
|
| I still think the old name better fit what we're doing
| because it admits that the work is still a philosophical
| endeavor.
|
| This is not to question the validity of what we now call
| science, but it's common these days to believe in the
| ultimate supremacy of science as the answer to questions that
| are best explored both philosophically and scientifically,
| and because pure science still can't answer important
| philosophical questions that that the entire scientific
| discipline rests upon.
| analog31 wrote:
| Tell me about the supremacy of science after the government
| restores the NIH, NOAA, etc. In fact most people in the
| world believe in the supremacy of their religious faiths.
| ysofunny wrote:
| My religious faith is science
|
| now what?
| analog31 wrote:
| I'm open minded about religion. It can be whatever you
| want.
| haswell wrote:
| You're describing anti-science sentiment, which is
| problematic and dangerous. But this is also whataboutism.
|
| I'm describing unfounded beliefs many people hold about
| science based mostly on a lack of philosophical
| understanding, which is orthogonal to anti-science
| sentiment and still important to examine.
|
| I don't see a reason for there to be tension between the
| two.
| analog31 wrote:
| I may have overreacted. I'm a scientist, and I'm
| surrounded by scientists. When I hear about "supremacy of
| science" it's usually being presented as a straw man. I
| don't know any scientists who believe it, beyond the
| temporary phase in everybody's education where they get
| caught up in the "master of the universe" feeling.
| ysofunny wrote:
| > I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy
|
| or in my words: "the first approximation is poetic. the last
| one is mathematical"
|
| from philosophy to hard-science and engineered tooling and
| other products (andor services)
|
| similarly to
|
| from poetry as dubious, cloudy, and vague ideas all the way
| to crystal clear, fixed and unmoving (dead) formalizations
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| I believe model and concept can be equivalent, not sure about
| the required formal terminology in English.
|
| Complexity is probably most formally modeled in entroy in
| thermodynamics, although it behaves in the opposite direction
| that these ideas and oberservations suggest it should.
|
| It still asks questions about the reason for this complexity
| and there is no scientific answer aside from "propably
| accidental complexity".
|
| Science is curious so it probably shouldn't be dismissed by
| unmet formal requirements that aren't specified. "Layman" is
| unspecific, so what would your requirements be exactly?
| coldtea wrote:
| > _- "identification of conceptual equivalencies among
| disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous
| laws of nature" - what exactly is a "conceptual equivalence"?
| You mean models?_
|
| No, a model is not an "identification of conceptual
| equivalencies among disparate phenomena". It's a simplified
| representation of a system.
|
| "identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate
| phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of
| nature" could be called an analogy, an isomorphism, a unifying
| framework, etc.
|
| > _Unifying disparate observations into models is basic
| science. Not sure why it is highlighted here as some important
| insight._
|
| Perhaps because the most important insights are the most basic
| ones - it's upon those eveything else sits upon.
|
| > _At this point, I gave up_
|
| If you can't bother beyond the abstract or 1st paragraph, or
| are perplexed that the abstract has a 10,000ft simplistic
| introduction into the basics, then it's better that you did :)
| kdavis wrote:
| "The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the
| supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out
| to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement
| with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's
| equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation -
| well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if
| your theory is found to be against the Second Law of
| Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it to
| collapse in deepest humiliation." -- Arthur Eddington, New
| Pathways in Science
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Entropy is always increasing in a closed system, but locally it
| can decrease, if energy is supplied from the outside. Us
| evolving on Earth comes at the expense of increased entropy of
| the Sun.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| I read a theory that life in the universe might be favorable
| because we increase entropy so much.
| pyfon wrote:
| Life in the universe is pretty unfavourable! A rare thing
| indeed. Where it has evolved I think it is less about
| entropy and more about the nature of the matter - atoms,
| molecules. Particularly carbon and water. And the way they
| can replicate themselves through chemistry. That had to
| obey entropy but is not driven by it. Light scattering off
| the atmosphere will do the entropy trick well enough!
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| > A rare thing indeed
|
| We can hardly know that, can we? Water and carbon are
| abundant.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > Entropy is always increasing in a closed system
|
| Only if that system isn't already in thermodynamic
| equilibrium. A closed system that reaches thermodynamic
| equilibrium has maximum entropy.
|
| Why the universe as a whole didn't start out in thermodynamic
| equilibrium, i.e doesn't have maximum entropy is something we
| don't understand.
| api wrote:
| Maybe it's not a closed system.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_cosmology
|
| I'm partial to the hypothesis that our universe is actually
| a giant black hole in some kind of larger universe. The Big
| Bang was really the formation of our universe's event
| horizon. Cosmic inflation is the result of stuff falling
| into our universe, adding to its mass-energy -- there is no
| dark energy, our universe is just accreting mass-energy
| from something larger.
|
| As for what the larger universe looks like -- in this model
| it may be impossible to know because the event horizon is
| impenetrable. It could be a much larger universe or it
| could be something else, like a higher dimensional one.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| If it were so, there would be no one to ask that question.
| EncomLab wrote:
| "Complexity" is a hugely problematic term when used in this way -
| remember that entropy and complexity are related, but they are
| not interchangeable. A complex system can have lower entropy than
| a simpler system, and conversely, a system can have high entropy
| but be relatively simple. By mingling these terms without
| specifying objective reference points, it all just comes out as
| word salad.
|
| This paper just reads like an attempt at sounding smart while
| actually saying little.
| pyfon wrote:
| Yes indeed. As I understand it, entropy is about states that
| are more likely.
|
| I wonder if it always increases though? Eventually there will
| be enough entropy that any change may cause it to reduce or
| oscillate? (At universe / reachable universe scale).
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Yes, we call that state "heat death". Note that the second
| law is actually that entropy never decreases; it's allowed to
| stay constant for certain interactions (for instance I'm
| pretty sure an elastic collision preserves entropy).
| kergonath wrote:
| > I wonder if it always increases though?
|
| It always increases _in an isolated system_. That caveat is
| almost always missing in pop-sci level of discussions about
| entropy, but it is crucial.
|
| > Eventually there will be enough entropy that any change may
| cause it to reduce or oscillate?
|
| Assuming that the universe is actually an isolated system,
| entropy will reach a maximum (it cannot oscillate). It is
| interesting to speculate, and of course our theories are
| imperfect and we are certainly missing something. In
| particular, the relationship between time and entropy is not
| straightforward. Very roughly: is the entropy a function of
| time, which we could define otherwise, or is time a
| consequence of entropy changes?
|
| In the first case, we can suppose that if the universe
| reaches an entropy maximum we'd be far enough outside the
| conditions under which our theories work that we'd just have
| entropy decrease with time (i.e., the rule that entropy
| increases with time is only valid close to our usual
| conditions).
|
| But in the second case, it would mean that the universe
| reached the end of time. It could evolve in any conceivable
| way (in terms of the fundamental laws of Physics), and the
| arrow of time would always point to the same moment. "What
| comes after?" Would be a question just as meaningless as
| "what came before the Big Bang?"
|
| In any case, there are a lot of assumptions and uncertainty.
| The story does not do the subject any justice.
| titzer wrote:
| > a system can have high entropy but be relatively simple.
|
| Good examples of these are anything that Kolmogorov-compresses
| well. For example, by almost any measure the output of a pseudo
| random number generator has high entropy. Yet it has low
| information density (low complexity), as the program that
| generates the sequence, plus its state, is really small.
| ysofunny wrote:
| that is why the complex is distinct from the complicated
| skywhopper wrote:
| I never trust the sense of new scientific ideas I get from
| popular press articles. But this comes across as highly
| questionable, "Intelligent Design" redux stuff. Sure there are
| some interesting points about information theory etc, but overall
| it sounds like a lot of scientists desperately cribbing concepts
| they don't actually understand from other fields and misapplying
| them to oversimplified computer simulations someone who barely
| understands Python wrote 20 years ago, and assuming the
| simulation, which has built-in, accidentally hard-coded selection
| factors, is the same as reality.
|
| Seriously, phrases like "selection for function", unified
| theories of biology and physics, and big ideas about the second
| law of thermodynamics are major red flags.
| grumple wrote:
| This seems to be in a similar vein to constructor theory /
| assembly theory:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory
| skim_milk wrote:
| Bookworms are such a curious people, I love reading their pop-
| evo-psych-theory-of-everything articles and counting up all the
| occult references and hidden meanings. Waiting for a deep yellow
| sunset with royal blue skies to appear some day where they spill
| all the beans!
| talles wrote:
| How does one measure complexity 'in the universe'?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what entropy is?
| cess11 wrote:
| "In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique
| process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter
| -- living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps
| inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the
| universe. According to this principle, entities are selected
| because they are richer in a kind of information that enables
| them to perform some kind of function."
|
| Sounds like they're struggling to accept that the cosmos is not
| conscious and it doesn't design, and possibly confuse the
| fantasies we construct to, as it might be phenomenologically put,
| make sense of our environment, with the environment itself.
|
| In ancient abrahamic cosmology it was proposed that the cosmos
| was designed, and first it was stone and water and so on, and
| then the biological matter was put in there, segmenting stone,
| hippopotamus and human into a kind of cosmological hierarchy of
| ethical and divine importance. Famous ancient greek philosophers
| imagined that there was another world shaping ours, geometrically
| purer and to people with a particular taste perceived as
| obviously more beautiful and holy.
|
| Different strains of similar thinking survived in parts of the
| world for a long time, and had a renaissance due to european
| colonialism spreading it with a diverse set of tools.
|
| One of the strongest views that followed is a cosmological
| dualism, the belief that there is something like soul or mind
| that is different from matter, usually paired with the belief
| that this is how truth enters the world and that truth is
| otherworldly, etherical.
|
| Modern physics turned out to be absolutely brutal towards ideas
| like these. For a hundred years experiment upon experiment just
| smashed such segmentations and expectations against a growing
| mountain of experiential evidence. As of yet we have no evidence
| of the cosmos being governed by laws and selection, it just is
| what it is and the supposed laws are human interpretations, hopes
| and fantasies.
|
| Protestant christianity is in an especially bad place due to this
| development, since it bets all it has on mental phenomena being
| more real than matter. Catholics and muslims can fall back on
| arguing that the divine is unknowable and that the effects of
| certain acts and traditions are socially beneficial, which
| sometimes puts them at odds with or makes them absolutely
| incompatible with worldly regimes of power. Protestant ideology
| on the other hand, can be fitted in with basically any regime,
| material conditions just aren't that important, ethically or
| otherwise.
|
| Looking at the micro-perspectives we didn't find geometrical
| simplicity, instead we found weird, messy fields and almost-
| existences, putting all sorts of expectations about the
| foundations of the cosmos into question. Maybe it'll change, but
| at the moment there's no evidence for some grand principle or
| cosmic selector or whatever. One might argue something here about
| cosmic constants or the symmetry Dirac sussed out but that's
| still just pushing human experience into an algebra.
|
| The expectation that life is somehow special is wrong. There is,
| as far as we can see, no difference in the quarks in a dog and
| those in a rock. The argument that 'DNA encodes more information'
| is childish, there are repetitive structures everywhere, like in
| the crystalline structures in a piece of rock. Protein sacks
| carrying their own emulation of a particular old ocean on a
| particular planet and flubbing around on land, carefully putting
| in salts and carbon and so on to keep it going, is neither more
| or less complex, neither more or less "information dense" in
| itself, than a photovoltaic panel pushing electrons to light up a
| screen.
|
| There is a good book from the nineties on this topic,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine#The_End_of_Cert....
| One should be very suspicious of people that talk about being
| cosmically selected, or about natural laws.
| b450 wrote:
| The authors here are claiming, as your quote states, that
| biological evolution is just one instance of a more general
| phenomenon. I'm not sure that's contrary to the views you're
| expressing. You wrote:
|
| > The expectation that life is somehow special is wrong. There
| is, as far as we can see, no difference in the quarks in a dog
| and those in a rock
|
| But the authors' examples do include the "speciation" of
| minerals! As I read it, the authors describe:
|
| - some initial set of physical states (organisms, minerals,
| whatever)
|
| - these states create conditions for new states to emerge,
| which in turn open up new possibilities or "phase spaces", and
| so on
|
| - these new phase spaces produce new ad hoc "functions", which
| are (inevitably, with time and the flow of energy) searched and
| acted upon by selective processes, driving this increase of
| "functional information".
|
| I don't think it's saying that living things are more complex
| or information dense per se, but rather, that this cycle of
| search, selection, and bootstrapping of new functions is a law-
| like generality that can be observed outside of living systems.
|
| I'm not endorsing this view! There do seem to be clear problems
| with it as a testable scientific hypothesis. But to my naive
| ear, all of this seems to play rather nicely with this
| fundamentally statistical (vs deterministic) picture of reality
| that Prigogine described, with the "arrow of time" manifesting
| not just in thermodynamics and these irreversible processes,
| but also in this diversification of functions.
| mbfg wrote:
| so at heat death of the universe, things will be more complex? i
| think not. There is clearly a limit to complexity, where that is
| when that is we don't know.
| fruktmix wrote:
| It is following the Fundamental theorem of software engineering,
| another level of indirection.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Sentences like this, i.e. "everything turns more complex", must
| be formulated much more precisely in order to become true.
|
| The article talks a lot about biological evolution, but in that
| case the only claim that is likely to be true is that the
| complexity of the entire biosphere increases continuously, unless
| a catastrophe resets the biosphere to a lower complexity.
|
| If you look only at a small part of the biosphere, like one
| species of living beings, it is extremely frequent to see that it
| evolves to become simpler, not more complex, because a simpler
| structure is usually optimal for constant environmental
| conditions, the more complex structures are mainly beneficial for
| avoiding extinction when the environmental conditions change.
| seydor wrote:
| Isn't that like saying that "some things take time"? Complexity
| also takes time to develop through a myriad probabilities. We
| even define complexity along the concept of things taking time or
| equivalent space/memory. As the authors say, functional
| information of physical systems is very difficult to quantify.
| Until then, this is another formulation of the anthropic
| principle , but with complexity instead of humanity.
| kens wrote:
| Coincidentally, I'm reading Walker's book "Life as No One Knows
| It: The Physics of Life's Emergence" on the same topic. (Walker
| is one of the researchers in the article.) Summary: I don't like
| the book. The book was motivating me to write an article "Books I
| don't like", but I'll comment here instead :-)
|
| The book describes "Assembly Theory", a theory of how life can
| arise in the universe. The idea is that you can quantitatively
| measure the complexity of objects (especially chemicals) by the
| number of recursive steps to create them. (The molecule ATP is 21
| for instance.) You need life to create anything over 15; the idea
| of life is it contains information that can create structures
| more complex than what can be created randomly. The important
| thing about life is that it isn't spontaneous, but forms an
| unbroken chain through time. Explaining how it started may
| require new physics.
|
| If the above seems unclear, it's because it is unclear to me. The
| book doesn't do a good job of explaining things. It looks like a
| mass-market science book, but I found it very confusing. For
| instance, it's unclear where the number 21 for ATP comes from,
| although there's an analogy to LEGO. The book doesn't define
| things and goes into many, many tangents. The author is very,
| very enthusiastic about the ideas but reading the book is like
| looking at ideas through a cloud of vagueness.
|
| The writing is also extremely quirky. Everyone is on a first-name
| basis, from Albert (Einstein) to Johnny (von Neumann) and Erwin
| (Schrodinger). One chapter is written in the second person, and
| "you" turn out to be "Albert." The book pushes the idea that
| physics is great and can solve everything, covering physics
| "greatest hits" from relativity and quantum mechanics to
| gravitational waves and the Higgs boson. (The underlying theme
| is: "Physics is great. This book is physics. Therefore, this book
| is great.") The book has a lot of discussion of how it is a new
| paradigm, Kuhn's paradigm shifts, how it will move astrobiology
| beyond the pre-paradigmatic phase and unify fields of research
| and so forth. It's not a crackpot book, but there are an
| uncomfortable number of crackpot red flags.
|
| I'm not rejecting the idea of assembly theory. To be honest,
| after reading the book, I don't understand it well enough to say
| which parts seem good and which parts seem flawed. There seem to
| be interesting ideas struggling to get out but I'm not getting
| them. (I don't like to be negative about books, but there are a
| few that I regret reading and feel that I should warn people.)
| roughly wrote:
| Walker gave a talk recently at Long Now on Assembly Theory that
| sounds like it did a better job of getting the point across:
|
| https://longnow.org/ideas/informational-theory-life/
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > It's not a crackpot book, but there are an uncomfortable
| number of crackpot red flags.
|
| How do you know it's not a crackpot book? All evidence you
| mentioned here seems to support that conclusion.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Amateur speculation, but informed by professionals: I think this
| tendency toward complexity is situational, not fundamental.
| Specifically, it's a product of this stage of the universe having
| lots of available energy. More complex structures are favored
| when/because they can consume more energy and increase entropy
| more effectively. The complexity will probably start fading when
| the hydrogen-fusion party dies. The second law will continue on
| its way.
| titzer wrote:
| This theory is absurd. They're unjustifiably generalizing from a
| single system--biological evolution on Earth[1]. There are
| literally no other places in our solar system even that are
| rapidly evolving to more complexity. Lots of dead rocks, hot and
| cold, and a bunch of boiling gas balls. Incidentally, none of
| these are turning into Cybertron. As it turns out, the chemistry
| that we know to be necessary for self-replicating things just
| doesn't work there. (Maybe there are other chemistries that will
| work, we don't know). So this specific chemistry and this
| specific set of conditions to kick off and indeed allow self-
| replication to continue are pretty damn important to
| understanding how it works.
|
| A "new force of nature"? It's just so pretentious. Some
| interesting biases of a selection process driven by copious
| excess energy doesn't make for a new force of nature. Otherwise
| we'd be positing all kinds of absurdities that are not directly
| explained by particle physics are woo woo a new force of nature--
| fashion choices (hey, copy, select, mutate there too).
|
| [1] And no, I don't think that the computer simulations of
| evolution they carry out are any additional evidence. So you made
| a computer program with a copy/select/mutate loop in it. Big
| deal. I can make a computer simulation about anything.
| afpx wrote:
| Pretty cool. I often wondered if the universe was evolving
| similar to natural selection via a reinforcement learning
| process. Wave function collapses to the value that maximizes some
| objective function.
|
| How would you test for it though? I've seen enough residual data
| from RL processes to almost see semblences of patterns that could
| be extracted and re-applied at a macro scale.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Likely could be due to laws of math in this universe where more
| is always desired more then less.
| Kungfuturtle wrote:
| This reminds me of Teilhard de Chardin's take on
| complexification, as laid out in his seminal book _Le Phenomene
| humain_. See e.g., this article[0] for a simple overview of the
| hypothesis. For further reading, I recommend the excellent new
| translation by Sarah Appleton-Weber, _The Human Phenomenon_ [1].
|
| [0]
| <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/%28SICI%2910...>
|
| [1]
| <https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/...>
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