7 ms·

I think we now know enough about the mechanics of life (molecular biology in particular) to conclude that we are simply fantastically complex clockwork automato

• garrybelka 9y ago
  Let's talk about something simpler first - about movies. We know enough about chemistry of photographic film to conclude that movies are simply fantastically complex clockwork automatons, correct?
  • robbintt 9y ago
    Agreed. A film and its corresponding image management toolchain is a fantastically complex automaton.
    • anigbrowl 9y ago
      Having made or worked on quite a few films, I can assure you that they don't watch themselves, and that if one has done one's job correctly they just repeat the exact same behavior every time. I would be quite interested to see a movie in which one of the characters decided to do something different from the previous viewing.
      • garrybelka 9y ago
        Pierre Menard could have made a movie. But even leaving that aside, and assuming for a moment that replays are indistinguishable (and one can enter the same river), would you accept that a movie is reducible to a photographic film chemistry?
        • anigbrowl 9y ago
          Oh sure. I'm disagreeing with the idea of it being an automaton qua having some ability to adjust to interaction rather than being static like a book.
      • robbintt 9y ago
        I don't know why you leapt to this thing about the film watching itself. The author did not ask me to assume this.
  • vernon99 9y ago
    Incorrect, movies are not automations, they are simple data sets. Movies+players combination is, yes. But this definition from the parent comment is an oversimplification. This is how the article framed it and its TL;DR: "living systems may be defined as open systems maintained in steady-states, far-from-equilibrium, due to matter-energy flows in which informed (genetically) autocatalytic cycles extract energy, build complex internal structures, allowing growth even as they create greater entropy in their environments, and capable, over multigenerational time, of evolution."
    • garrybelka 9y ago
      So Yojimbo and Wild strawberries are simple data sets. Where does inspiration come into play?
  • crimsonalucard 9y ago
    I think the difference between life and machines is in how entropy is shifted. Life goes on while, all machines degrade over time.
• tux1968 9y ago
  Doesn't "clockwork" imply that true randomness can't exist and quantum physics tell us that it does?
  • throwaway91111 9y ago
    I don't think clockwork implies determinism, only that rational actors can understand cause and effect in the system. Much like a window into clockwork. That said, i do appreciate the horror of being a wound up automaton, but i think this is a mistake to think of humans as primarily rational. Hubris, even, might be a good name for it. We are influenced by thousands of arbitrary signals every day and react in mostly normal ways; this doesn't seem to scare people at all. That is: even if we have a full mechanism of free will, we don't have functional free will, as humans are clearly influenced by many unconscious factors. I'd have to look at Jefferson's writings again to confirm, but i thought "god" in a deism sense was portrayed, in many senses, as a scientist himself watching the progress of the universe, not an author laying out a grand, anthropomorphic, meaning-laden story. That is: even the clockwork deists were not explicitly deterministic!
  • Xcelerate 9y ago
    > true randomness can't exist and quantum physics tell us that it does? Not necessarily. Quantum physics says that certain things are unpredictable. I consider indeterminism separate from the "truly random", with the former being generated via an algorithm and the latter being produced via no algorithm whatsoever. It may be the case that since the measuring system (the experimenter) is necessarily entangled with the measured system, the information needed to perfectly predict eigenstate selection is inaccessible, and thus appears perfectly random, since it is formally unpredictable. What would be interesting though is if someone devised an experiment to ascertain whether eigenstate selection is predictable in a universal sense although not necessarily predictable to us since we're part of the system that is being predicted. How such an experiment would be devised is beyond me though.
    • whatshisface 9y ago
      Well, here's an argument in favor of true randomess: If there was a PRNG deciding the outcome of measurements, it would have to have the mathematical moving parts exist somewhere as hidden variables. Hidden variables are outlawed by Bell's theorem and a couple of other things. Therefore, the randomness must be stateless and truly random.
• robbintt 9y ago
  On an evolutionary scale, life exploits the boundary between signal and noise to migrate across its manifold substrate. There is no reason to presume that statistical interference does not contribute to outcomes more locally.
  • trevyn 9y ago
    Are you saying that, while it appears that we understand the basic mechanics involved, there may be non-obvious interactions that have additional explanatory power?
    • robbintt 9y ago
      It is common for people to assume that chemistry works mechanically, and we have, in fact, been very successful at reducing a great number of biochemical interactions to pretty much raw mechanics. Also, life has a stake in reducing a stream of inputs into 'gated' processes, because life exists by providing a stable interface for its replicator core. However, this doesn't mean that the stream of inputs in all cases reduces to 'gated' processes. I agree that most of what makes up life is a grand, replicating automaton, but I think there is a soft core to it that retains the controlled unpredictability of a solution in brownian motion or a population in genetic drift.
  • dTal 9y ago
    Please don't post nonsense on HN.
    • anigbrowl 9y ago
      I did not find it nonsensical in the least.
      • dTal 9y ago
        It looks like postmodernist fluff to me. I assume from the downvotes it received that I'm not the only one. I accept the possibility that we all missed some great insight - would you care to give us a hint?
• dTal 9y ago
  I disagree with your use of the word "simply". "Automaton" is another potentially problematic word. Wiki tells me it means, literally, "acting of one's own will" - which we do - but most people would use it to refer to something that lacks some essential component of being human, which definitionally we don't. It is not a compliment to be called an automaton.
• benjohnson 9y ago
  I submit that if you would make an exact clone of me and subject both of us to the exact same condition that we would behave differently. I suspect it is because our two brains (while identical physically) would have differing quantum states such that the superstructure of active connections would be impossible to measure perfectly - and therefore impossible to duplicate perfectly.
  • brut 9y ago
    The "exact" clone that you propose is fundamentally impossible. What you're looking for is the no-cloning theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem
• Scarblac 9y ago
  Yes, but clearly computers are also fantastically complex clockwork automatons, and they aren't alive. So it's not a complete definition.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • trevyn 9y ago
    Right! I suspect our intuitive definition of life includes a biological substrate. If I were somehow able to to engineer a new species of viable biological organism, possibly even not using any existing DNA building blocks, I think most people would consider the result "alive". When really I just created a new program for molecular machinery to run.
• Turing_Machine 9y ago
  The issue is with your word "simply". On one level, it's true, but on another level it's not. The Eiffel Tower is "simply" a bunch of puddled iron. On an even more reductionist level, it's simply a bunch of quarks, as are you. While "Both you and the Eiffel Tower are simply bunches of quarks." is a true description (according to modern physics), it's not a very useful one. It says nothing about why the Eiffel Tower is different from other bunches of quarks, and definitely says nothing about (e.g.) what kind of reaction you might have to visiting Paris and climbing the Eiffel Tower. Would you be scared (acrophobic)? Exhilarated? Bored? The "bunch of quarks" description is of absolutely no help there. Reductionist models have their uses, but attempting to use them to explain everything is a grievous mistake.
  • justinpombrio 9y ago
    > While "Both you and the Eiffel Tower are simply bunches of quarks." is a true description (according to modern physics), it's not a very useful one. Except that in this case, the molecular details of life are useful. If you want to know why people need salt you need to know about ion channels. (This is in contrast to your Eiffel Tower example, where you don't gain much insight by looking at molecules than you knew at the material-science level.)
    • Turing_Machine 9y ago
      But ion channels (and their function) are on a much higher level than quarks. Looking at things at the quark level doesn't tell you anything about ions, or salt, or, for that matter, people. :-)
• sireat 9y ago
  The question is are we simply automatons? Yes we are automatons ("a really smart meat" per Ready Player One) but is that all there is to human life? 1. To me the mystery lies in the awareness. Modern neuroscience/psychology/cognitive science/ are aware that subconscious accounts for most of brain's activity. The aware part is such a small part that it is reasonable to ask whether it is needed at all. Anecdotally we all have heard stories of people doing things on auto-pilot unaware of doing them(driving, blacked out shenanigans, etc). Thus I can very well imagine a Chalmer's zombie which functions identical to most humans. 2. The biggest problem with simple reductionist strategy into automatons is what it means for morals/ethics. It's not only that everything becomes "vae victis" or localized majority consensus. No globals left not even the golden rule. Even worse everything becomes almost nonsensical. Nihilist ISIS suicide bombers trying to escape the matrix then make as much sense as Elon Musk trying to expand humanity to Mars. Just some automatons trying to make sense of it all.
  • marcosdumay 9y ago
    It changes nothing for ethics. It's a discipline shaped by the human emotions, and those don't change depending on our free-will (whatever meaning that word even has).
    • sireat 9y ago
      It changes the practical side. As more and more psychopaths learn that there is no global ruleset the more entropy we get. If everyone learns that there is no difference between suicide and drinking coffee(via Sartre), then the number of suicides will inevitably rise. There are people who supported certain presidential candidate(s) just for the lolz. They were proud of their nihilism.
  • trevyn 9y ago
    I think your #2 is why I bring this up. It's interesting that our in-depth understanding of the specific mechanics is fairly recent; before, it was easy to say that there may be some essential quality of life that made it unique and valuable, simply because it wasn't fully understood. The implications start getting dangerously close to http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html "keep track of opinions that get people in trouble, and start asking, could this be true? Ok, it may be heretical (or whatever modern equivalent), but might it also be true?"
• sbmassey 9y ago
  Clockwork is not a model that immediately springs to mind when I consider the complex chemical interactions and environmental sensitivity of a eukaryotic cell.