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Of course not. Shuffle a deck of cards. If you did it properly, the new arrangement is unique. No deck of cards has ever been arranged like that before, and no
by philh 11y ago
Of course not.
Shuffle a deck of cards. If you did it properly, the new arrangement is unique. No deck of cards has ever been arranged like that before, and none will ever again, unless you deliberately preserve it.
I just drew a scribble on a post-it note. Nobody else has a scribble quite like it, or ever will again, after I throw it away.
Every time a snowflake melts, something beautiful and unique is lost forever.
None of these things are special, unless you're using a really weird meaning of "special".
You can say that they might be unique, but they're sufficiently similar to other things that they might as well not be - but what distance metric are you using? You're using one shaped by your own values, which say that one human is special even in the presence of another seven billion humans, but that one snowflake is unimportant in the presence of another seven billion.
It might be that rareness is a prerequisite of specialness. It's not the only factor.
- bduerst 11y agoThe order in a deck of cards is unique, but it's not complex. The nucleotide sequence in a chromosome is unique and complex. An analogy of your comparison would be comparing a single sentence to the sum of mankind's written works, with the latter being life. A complex, organized source of information like that is special.
- philh 11y agoIf you shuffle a deck of 3 billion cards, the order is less compressible than the human genome. It's still not special. Is it complex, by your definition? How about my scribble, or a snowflake?
- bduerst 11y agoIt would be complex but no longer unique. If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a single cell?
- philh 11y agoWhy would a shuffle of 3 billion distinct cards be less unique than a shuffle of 52 distinct cards? > If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a single cell? No. It would be a unique string of worthless jibberish. Meanwhile, the instructions for a Saturn V rocket have probably been written down in at least two places. So if you have a copy of them, they're less unique than my random string, yet more special.
- bduerst 11y agoRight, the information is unique, not the medium. There are multiple copies of the Saturn V blueprints, just as there are multiple copies of the human genome in your cells. Is Lord of the Rings not unique because it's stored on multiple mediums?
- cousin_it 11y agoMaybe along with Kolmogorov complexity we could measure "usefulness" of a bit string, i.e. how much utility an agent would agree to pay for it. The idea is that "complex" things, like life, are likely to contain solutions to many problems we care about. Of course that approach depends on the agent, but maybe you could get a general definition by referring to a general agent, like AIXItl.
- chm 11y agoWouldn't the compression depend on how many symbols you used? I guess you meant "shuffle a deck of 3 billion different cards"?
- lhorie 11y agoSomething doesn't need to be complex to be special. Consider this card deck order: 8C KH 3S 10D 2C 7H 9S 5D QC 4H AS 6D JC 8H KS 3D 10C 2H 7S 9D 5C QH 4S AD 6C JH 8S KD 3C 10H 2S 7D 9C 5H QS 4D AC 6H JS 8D KC 3H 10S 2D 7C 9H 5S QD 4C AH 6S JD As far as mathematics go, it's as probabilistically likely as any other sequence, but among deck orders, this particular sequence is special because not only it happens more often than most other deck orders, but it even has a name. As it turns out, that sequence can be easily reconstructed from a mnemonic and it's often used in magic tricks.
- bduerst 11y agoBut sequence is unique, but could arguably randomly come up like you say. My point was that biological information is both complex and unique, which makes it special.
- rnovak 11y agoThe dictionary definition of special is "really weird"? Literally: "better, greater, or otherwise different from what is usual." So...if a snowflake is "beautiful" and "unique", you have the necessary and sufficient conditions for "special". Just saying....
- philh 11y agoThat definition is meaningless without a distance metric (for "different") or a scoring function (for "better, greater"). And some reference point for "usual" - are we comparing this snowflake to all the other snowflakes? To a grain of sand?[1] To every other subset of atoms in the universe? In the context of this article, I'm pretty sure "special" is intended to mean things like "valuable [to humans]" and "worth preserving [to humans]", and to distinguish life from mundane things like snowflakes and scribbles. It seems really weird to me, to ask "is life special just because it's rare?" in a context where the word "special" applies to snowflakes. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sand_under_electron_microscope.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sand_under_electron_...
- rnovak 11y agoFirst off, random !== unique, not even close, ESPECIALLY for things with discrete properties. We know from the pigeon-hole principal, that from enough instances, something will be repeated. So, unique it is not. In your card example, there are 52! (factorial) permutations, but if you shuffle a deck of cards (52! + 1) times, you will have repeated at least one permutation at least once. It's been proven, you can't avoid it. The permutation is pseudo-random however, meaning that we cannot distinguish it from pure chance. But, beyond that, special !== valuable. Those words are different, not synonyms. Same to "worth preserving", it's not a valid meaning of "special". Furthermore, life isn't just random, there are seemingly an infinite number of variables that influence it. That's not discrete, meaning it's beyond "just random", it actually can be unique, such that even with infinite time, it might not ever be repeated. So yes, life is special, it's not just a permutation, at least, it hasn't been proven to be so yet. Additionally, I'd rather view life as being special that live in a world where everything is considered "mundane".
- chongli 11y agoIf you did it properly In this case, you've just wiped out your whole statement with weasel words. What does it mean to shuffle a deck properly?
- lhorie 11y agoI'd think he means a fair shuffle, as opposed to, say, a faro shuffle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faro_shuffle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faro_shuffle)
- x3n0ph3n3 11y agoThis is what it means to not shuffle a deck properly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffling#False_shuffles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffling#False_shuffles