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I want to understand this argument better. Are you claiming that any "structured low entropy process that dissipates energy" is alive? How are you defining life
by millstone 8y ago
I want to understand this argument better. Are you claiming that any "structured low entropy process that dissipates energy" is alive? How are you defining life?
- wool_gather 8y agoI may be putting words into the parent's mouth here, but I think the argument is just analogical. That there are emergent effects to physical processes that are difficult/nearly impossible to predict from basic physical law. And therefore we should withhold judgement about the difficulty of life forming, given that we so far have a limited understanding of the relevant physics.
- andbberger 8y agoNah I mean it pretty literally. You are very right that the necessary physics isn't really there, this is a really difficult thing to state rigorously. However I would argue that the underlying reasoning emerges out of fairly fundamental physics.. and that while difficult to state rigorously the core idea is kindof... obvious... to anyone with a strong physics background...
- andbberger 8y agoPretty much. I define life as any self-sustaining structured low entropy process that dissipates energy faster than diffusion. The low entropy part basically means that such a configuration is vanishingly improbable under _equilibrium_ statistical mechanics. Under this definition convection rolls, viruses and eukaryotes are all alive.