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The dictionary definition of special is "really weird"? Literally: "better, greater, or otherwise different from what is usual." So...if a snowflake is "beaut

• philh 11y ago
  That 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 ago
    First 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".
    • philh 11y ago
      You're never going to shuffle a deck of cards 52!+1 times. It's unique within the extent of this physical universe. If that's not the universe of discourse, you're going to need to specify what is. Of course life is special. But it's not special just because it's rare. I don't know why it's special, but I do know that's not it. And I know that whether or not life is random, even if it would be repeated in a universe with infinite time, it would remain special. If your definition of "special" relies upon subtle facts about the universe that may not ever be knowable... I'm going back to "that's really weird". Similarly, I know that special and valuable aren't the same thing. But I don't have a good definition of special (you gave a bad one), so I was attempting to point at the sort of things that correlate with it.
      • rnovak 11y ago
        While I agree somewhat with what you're saying, I'd like to ask something about the playing card example. In a deck of cards, if you consider any ordering without any meaning added, then it is literally just 1/52!. however, what if you started ascribing meaning to the different cards? Would it be special then if your shuffeling resulted in all face-cards being grouped together? What about if all like-numbers were grouped together (i.e. all 1's, all 2's, all 3's) and so-on? What about the case when the cards get shuffled and end up in ascending/descending order? i.e. {1H, 2H ... KH, 1S, 2S, ...}. There are only 4 such permuations possible, making it an infinitesimal chance that you arrive at that specific ordering. Couldn't that be viewed as special? I guess in this case, I'm saying that the tuple of {Meaning, Uniqueness} is indeed special, not just uniqueness alone.