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> If life is a 'property' of the universe, everything else also is, and the word ceases to have any meaning. Why would life be all encompassing? It is just a t

> If life is a 'property' of the universe, everything else also is, and the word ceases to have any meaning. Why would life be all encompassing? It is just a thing on its own, and quite small in its manifestation. The way I framed the assumption is that life (I know it's hard to dismantle the meaning inside the word and see it separate from us) is just as time woven in, working in the opposite direction of time. I have developed this here: https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/the-meaning-of-life-afeac3662bae#.2q1fcdt4g https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/the-meanin... As for the idea, it is exactly NOT religious I want it to be seen. A property is a characteristic and I don't know if life would be an essential or accidental property of our (this) universe. Awareness, our subjective existence, subjects of religion and philosophy are completely separate subjects from life and the phenomenon of evolution it produces. As for evidence, I would dare quote evolution and the spawning of it. But I can solely produce thought experiment type of evidence :) from my current settings.

jhanschoo 10y ago
For one, you need to better define life. Are you referring to life in the biological sense? You say that it is distinct from consciousness. Will bacteria qualify? What about viruses?
- andraganescu 10y ago
  yes bacteria and viruses qualify. I propose biology is a process made possible by life and evolution a phenomenon inside this process. for entertainment purposes i have an attempt to define life here: https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/the-meaning-of-life-afeac3662bae?source=linkShare-8e7d1e45df9-1482844617 https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/the-meanin...
  - jhanschoo 10y ago
    Back to your original article, I think several scientific notions of yours are misguided. I presume that by entropy you refer to information entropy, not thermodynamic entropy, and I think you have conflated these two different notions that are called entropy. Thermodynamic entropy is concerned with how easily energy can be transferred from one thermodynamic system to another, while information entropy is concerned with how many bits we require to select a string from a group of possible strings. > The void has in theory the highest level of entropy. Matter randomly spawns into existence, then back into non existence. Can’t get any more chaotic than that. On the contrary, a vacuum has very little information density; to describe a region of space to that is a vacuum to any degree of precision requires fewer words than to describe any space on earth to the same degree of precision, since the vacuum is very uniform. Your impression that the void is more chaotic than our everyday environments is a misreading of pop-sci physics books; the same chaos happens throughout, even in matter-dense regions of space. I think that your article illustrates why many critical thinkers refrain from creating cosmologies; our present scientific understanding and tools are still so immature that we cannot accurately describe our own minds and bodies, let alone with any certainty the human societies; and that let alone the cosmos, let alone one person's attempt. Though it seems to me that physics has a tradition of producing outspoken physicists with enough hubris to think otherwise.

jhanschoo 10y ago

For one, you need to better define life. Are you referring to life in the biological sense? You say that it is distinct from consciousness. Will bacteria qualify? What about viruses?

andraganescu 10y ago
yes bacteria and viruses qualify. I propose biology is a process made possible by life and evolution a phenomenon inside this process. for entertainment purposes i have an attempt to define life here: https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/the-meaning-of-life-afeac3662bae?source=linkShare-8e7d1e45df9-1482844617 https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/the-meanin...
- jhanschoo 10y ago
  Back to your original article, I think several scientific notions of yours are misguided. I presume that by entropy you refer to information entropy, not thermodynamic entropy, and I think you have conflated these two different notions that are called entropy. Thermodynamic entropy is concerned with how easily energy can be transferred from one thermodynamic system to another, while information entropy is concerned with how many bits we require to select a string from a group of possible strings. > The void has in theory the highest level of entropy. Matter randomly spawns into existence, then back into non existence. Can’t get any more chaotic than that. On the contrary, a vacuum has very little information density; to describe a region of space to that is a vacuum to any degree of precision requires fewer words than to describe any space on earth to the same degree of precision, since the vacuum is very uniform. Your impression that the void is more chaotic than our everyday environments is a misreading of pop-sci physics books; the same chaos happens throughout, even in matter-dense regions of space. I think that your article illustrates why many critical thinkers refrain from creating cosmologies; our present scientific understanding and tools are still so immature that we cannot accurately describe our own minds and bodies, let alone with any certainty the human societies; and that let alone the cosmos, let alone one person's attempt. Though it seems to me that physics has a tradition of producing outspoken physicists with enough hubris to think otherwise.