12 ms·
What Is Life? (2019)
- ssijak 6y agoA blip between 2 ethernal nothingness.
- plutonorm 6y agoThe antidote you are looking for is panpsychism.
- nathias 6y agoPanpsychism is dumb.
- tylerjwilk00 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
- apocalypstyx 6y agoThis doesn't fundamentally alter ssijak's point. Even applied to the whole of existence, that existence takes place between points of temporal indeterminacy. Even if this could be viewed as lengthening the "blip" it does so in the context that the given length of time between temporal indeterminacies is immaterial due to the nature of such indeterminacies and thus still remains, in effect, "blip"-like.
- eternalban 6y agoTechnically correct, but the therapeutic ("antidote") aspect of panpsychism hinges on the critical choice of the meta-physics that you ascribe to 'IT'.
- dwaltrip 6y agoIs there any experimental evidence for panpsychism?
- bumby 6y agoI don't know much on the topic, but from what I've heard it can hinge on how you define consciousness. If consciousness is defined as processing of information, it can be inherent down to at least photon level. I'm hoping somebody can chime in who can explain better than me.
- notsureaboutpg 6y agoI've recently been thinking that as much as we say this to ourselves, we don't actually believe it. If this were really true, why do so many people live such normal by-the-books lives? If there's nothing after you die, why are people scared to do dangerous things? Why do they work their whole lives and enjoy so little of it? People say this is your only life so they are afraid to lose it but then why wouldn't you do all sorts of taboo things in your only life, especially if you know it will end soon, think terminal illnesses etc. Most people claim to believe that there's nothing after life but most people also live like there is clearly some evaluation of life that makes a respectable life worth living. Weird to think about it like that.
- aftabh 6y agoAnd, what a "blip"!!
- amelius 6y agoWe haven't even figured out what time is. So basing definitions on it seems premature.
- csomar 6y agoI think we agreed that time doesn't exist and we live in a spacetime continuum?
- PoachedSausage 6y agoSo you are saying that life is effectively a Dirac Delta Function. I guess I always knew that infinity was buried in there somewhere.
- plutonorm 6y agoA virus is a meta lifeform. It is life that operates given the existence of metabolising organisms. Life operates directly over the physical matter in the universe, a virus just operates a step above this.
- t_serpico 6y agowell said
- patcon 6y agoReally like this "meta lifeform" idea. I'd suggest it might go further, even into the realm of language, story, and culture. Might there be a case for claiming language itself is another level of meta lifeform that has grown and evolved within the habitable neural landscape of our mind. Perhaps this is what separates us from animals. So obscure theories from computational linguists get pretty deep in this stuff. I haven't been able to stop thinking about this stuff since I read about it last year. Language as organism: A brief introduction to the Leiden theory of language evolution https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316659539_Language_as_organism_A_brief_introduction_to_the_Leiden_theory_of_language_evolution https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316659539_Language_...
- pavas 6y agoYou're describing memes.
- patcon 6y agoThe distinctions (between all the ways "meme" is used) are addressed pretty well in van Driem's papers and book chapters. In short, Dawkinsian "memes" are a very weakened version, mostly based on rote mimicking and copying. His meme was actually more strongly defined in the prior literature that he borrowed the term from and diluted. The Leiden hypothesis leans on a harder version, in which memes are quite literally a new strata of life and our minds are co-evolved host organisms that straddle two layers -- a cyborg of biological and semiotic organisms. Our minds might be better conceived as akin to the fertile replication machinery of the biological systems below (ie. DNA polymerase) -- Where the linear packets of information are remixed and recombined after being delivered from the internal and external environment. And if there's some truth there, then it prompts lots of questions (e.g., about what is the most appropriate unit of life at the cultural/linguistic level. Because DNA polymerase is not what we normally consider "alive" -- we consider the aggregate cell alive. etc. etc)
- mseepgood 6y ago> "And we may also wonder if a sentient computer program might one day be called alive of course" Why does a computer program have to be sentient to be called alive?
- namero999 6y agoLife is metabolism, so a computer program or a silicon-based intelligence cannot be considered alive by current definition. Either we rework the definition or it will definitely not be alive. Also, sentience and intelligence are two very different things, I think we are very far from having ethical problems with switching off computers (if ever).
- smilliken 6y agoComputers and their programs consume energy in the form of electricity to do work. How is that not metabolism? I recall seeing a reference to a biological species that also consumes electricity. In addition, they use that energy to (often) lower internal entropy and replicate themselves. They evolve with the assistance of a symbiote (humans), and are subject to competitive pressures for evolutionary fitness. Mating is almost unheard of, but composition of parts is rampant.
- namero999 6y agoThat's exactly the difference, computers consume energy, while metabolism is the process of creation (and of course, consumption) of energy. An unplugged computer won't start to autonomously break down and convert chemicals into electricity to keep itself running, hence it's not alive.
- cortic 6y ago> An unplugged computer won't start to autonomously break down and convert chemicals into electricity to keep itself running.. You just described a laptop.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Daniel_sk 6y agoIn the book Sapiens there was an interesting thought that life is basically information that is trying to "survive". In the same way you can look at religion as some sort of information that spreads in people minds and without people it would ceise to exist or have even reasons to exist - the same way like a virus is just information that goes from host to host. Viruses can represent the simplest form of what life is actually trying to achieve. I am over simplifying that part of book, but it definitely gave me an interesting different look on life.
- alexpetralia 6y agoYes I've long thought that the actual unit of evolution is not the gene but instead the "pattern". Genes are merely a conduit for information. Even through artificial selection, we can "select out" genes we don't want. What remains? What survives? A pattern.
- jhedwards 6y agoIn George C Williams' book Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges, he starts the book with some philosophical problems for biologists. One of my favorites is that he points out a sharp distinction between the "codical" domain and the domain of "interactors". Interactors are the physical organisms that interact with each other and the environment. The codices are the information stored in the genes. He makes this point to emphasize that the world of information has its own rules that are different from the rules of physical bodies, and that the interactors seem to exist merely to ensure the continued propagation of the information.
- Enginerrrd 6y agoMy own personal definition of life is the following, somewhat hand-wavy, theoretically weak, though pragmatically strong definition: Life is anything capable of sloppy self-replication in a sufficiently complex environment. Viruses are definitely alive. Something like Tierra [1], Avida[2], or modern variants[3] of mutating copying programs come close, giving rise to whole ecosystems of parasites and hosts and defenses, etc. though perhaps they are lacking the "sufficient complexity" necessary so as not to stall out and stop evolving much. Chemistry provides such a massive environment of complexity that it's hard to replicate elsewhere, though I'd argue it's hardly impossible. The problem with this article's definition is that, with near certainty, the first progenitor lifeform on earth did NOT utilize ANY of the DNA/RNA protein translation machinery they state are necessary to meet their definition of alive. You can find some surpringly good statistical analyses of this assertion in an unlikely ally: creationist statistical arguments. They prove pretty definitively that life didn't begin with a transcriptase protein popping into existence. What are the problems with my definition: The big theoretical hole: You could concoct some hypothetical scenario where something I'd definitely agree is alive replicates using some star trek technology that doesn't allow for the "sloppy" part. W/e, I consider this pragmatically irrelevant. The second big objection: It allows us to consider many things as "alive" that most would say are not. In my opinion, this is actually a major strength. Ok, but what about things like crystals? Personally, I consider some type of self-catalysing crystal or quasicrystal to be one of the most plausible forms of original life on earth. That said, they seem to be lacking the "sufficient complexity" aspect. However, are they really? I'm not so sure. Is it possible for a particular pattern of crystal defects to bring about a replication of sorts of that defect pattern elsewhere in the crystal during crystallization? That may be enough complexity particularly when you consider substitutions (when one element in the crystal lattice gets swapped for another). If some type of pattern of crystal defects or quasicrystal or something developed sufficient self-catalysing ability to bring about a form of sloppy self-replication, it's likely that's enough for life provided that the environment allows it under entropy considerations. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation) [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life
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- analog31 6y agoI think it's reasonable to recognize genetic replication as being a defining feature of life on earth as we know it today, without ruling out discovery or invention of other possibilities in the future. If you brought me a blob of something and ask me whether it contained "life," I'd analyze it for DNA or RNA. In the absence of those things I'd look for a preponderance of chirally selected molecules.
- yters 6y agoWhat if the universe itself is alive, just on a vastly longer timescale than normal organic life? It contains all other life, after all.
- douglaswlance 6y agoLife is a _single_ self-propagating chemical reaction.
- soufron 6y agoThis is only a simple take on the life-as-a-computer metaphor. The problem is that it's only a metaphor.
- bonoboTP 6y agoBefore all the details we need to arrive at the right ballpark and establish the basics. I know on my example that even though I got through school with good grades, I was still full of misconceptions due to a few key errors fed from teachers, bullshit pseudo knowledge I picked up from ufo+mystery magazines and TV edutainment. So first, there is nothing special about life. Life doesn't break the normal laws of physics we use to describe everything else. Our naive concept is often along the lines of a game engine with inputs coming "from outside", from spirits or something. But there's no evidence of that. Living material is ordinary. Physics teachers will explain that heat doesn't go from cold to warm places. If you ask how fridges can exist, they may say "well, heat doesn't go there by itself", invoking some kind of magic explanation. Now I know there are more precise phrasing in physics, but that's beside my point. We grow up with a concept that there are things that happen "by themselves" and there are things that happen due to living creatures' actions. In this implicit naive view that many, including past me hold, a fridge does an exceptional thing because it vaguely obeys our effortful engineering intentions. We make it do that, it doesn't do it out of its own nature. Actually in primary school physics class when we learned the concept of forces, we learned different categories: magnetic, gravitational, "holding/mounting" force, friction force, muscle force... And we had to label the arrows in different everyday cartoons, like a kid pulling a sled in the snow: muscle force towards the kid, gravity down, holding force from the ground up, friction force backward. As if muscle force was some irreducible special magic phenomenon in physics. While correctly teaching basic school-level vector calculus skills they failed at teaching fundamental world view skills. Because there's no distinction like this. Life doesn't violate the second law of thermodynamics. Of course this article also doesn't claim that, but as I said, it's important to first arrive on the same page, in the same ballpark before the high resolution discussion.
- frongpik 6y ago"Life doesn't violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics" sounds similar to "magnetism does no work". Yet we know that magnetism creates macroscopic effects: a magnet can lift an iron nail, despite it does no work. The way it's explained is that magnetism somehow redirects other forces that do the work. My point is that something can do work without doing work "on paper" because all the work is done by others.
- carabiner 6y agoBall is life.
- szczepano 6y agoIsn't life just light projection, why complicate things with chemical equations ?
- Traubenfuchs 6y agoAn unpleasant philosophical discussion* about the multiple definitions or the lack of even one proper definition for one annoying word. It has no meaning! No matter how we define life or being alive, the atoms, reality, physics, chemistry don't change. Say we decide a virus is properly alive -what does it matter? What does that decision affect? * if it's pleasant, it's probably not a philosophical discussion like most philosophical discussions
- iamkdev 6y agoIt's a collections of shit we do till death.
- vardhanw 6y agoIt was interesting to also read his previous article in "Is biology too complex to understand" [1], where he surmises that after the initial "physicsization" of the discovery process in biology, where you came up with the whole DNA, RNA, amino acids (codons), ribosome, protein and related discoveries, there is a lot of complexity left undiscovered and which may not have simplified/abstract solutions/theorems a la physics. This is exemplified with the reported 100+ articles per hour in pub med, which cannot be expected to be understood by a human (or groups of humans) to any significant extent to extend the boundaries of our understanding in a fundamental sense and the hope is that machines (ML) may help us in getting a better send of the discovery landscape and provide insights we may not be able to divine ourselves. Which leads the the (my) question - what is the current level of development in ML theory & practice to "understand" a particular set of research articles to create a "knowledge database" which can then be used to ask questions about it or relate the consisting articles etc.I know some basic research in NLP like topic modeling, question answering, summarization, information extraction, etc. and perhaps some sort of causal reasoning can be applied, but is there enough progress in this so as to start meeting the goals he wishes for - i.e to be able to advance science by machine processing of research articles as an aid for further insights and research? [1] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/biologists-physics-envy/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/biologists-physics-envy/
- koeng 6y agoHow many git repos are published per hour to github? It probably doesn't matter, practically speaking, for you to build cool things. Similar to the results from pubmed. For a significant amount of synthetic biology, you don't really need NLP or anything. You literally just need to get good at parsing a bunch of XML and text databases, sprinkled with a little bit of data dumps + ML, to be better than the vast majority of engineering done in the field right now. (Genbank + Uniprot + Rhea -> SQL database you can do some intense things with)
- mcphage 6y ago"Life" is an english word. There will never be a definition of "life" that includes everything we want included, and excludes everything we want excluded, because there is no distinct corresponding physical thing that it refers to, nor should there be any expectation of one. It's just a word.
- verma7 6y agoThe analogy of the question "What is life?" with "What is a computer?" bring up interesting parallels. The author defines a computer as any device that has transistors, RAM, etc that is, the computing substrate. But there were devices that didn't use transistors, but used vacuum tubes or mechanical gears (like Babbage's Analytical engine), which I think are still computers. We have some good theoretical model of computers: like Turing machines. One possible definition of a computer is any device that is Turing complete. I wonder what such a theoretical model of life would look like.
- frongpik 6y agoThe analogy goes deeper. Most of us are familiar with the spirit-soul-body concept. Descriptions of the three are very similar to concepts in CS: spirit is the algorithm or an idea - in this sense the spirit is immutable and the same for all devices, soul is the software - it's mutable, implemented in a particular language or framework and generally strives to be a perfect reflection of the spirit, and finally the cpu itself with all the machinery running electrons is the body - it's run by that almost immaterial soul, although no part of that machinery, not even a single electron, is a part of the soul. The connection between the three can be easily understood by CS folks, but is a great mystery for uninitiated (i.e. those who can't code). There's even a striking analogy of good an evil. "The evil is affirmation of disorder" (Eliphas Levi) and that is bugs and poor chaotic design: software that embraces this disorder, gives up liberty and reason (aka the good) and becomes evil, for evil has neither liberty nor reason. I'm sure The Matrix used this very analogy.
- xchip 6y agoWhat is love?
- jschulenklopper 6y agoHaddaway - a late European philosopher - had that same question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe5q_TdKbsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe5q_TdKbsk
- ende 6y agoA localized reversal of entropy.
- f430 6y agoThe purpose of life is for the consciousness to realize that it is part of the whole. There is some form of an attractor force, outside of our immediate 3d world, that is attracting all self-aware sentient entities to become. Applying western science and demanding evidence when it cannot be comprehended by the human mind is like the petulant child who asks why at the end of every sentence. Terrence Mckenna is probably the only Westerner who has been able to articulate what the rest of the ancient civilizations have figured out independently.
- sebmellen 6y agoTerence McKenna really was a magician, in the sense that he could speak magic words and manifest his ideas in your head very clearly. The concept you reference is what he called "The Transcendental Object at the End of Time". See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XMz4hWR5i0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XMz4hWR5i0
- PoachedSausage 6y agoThe guy was really a master story teller, whether you take what he was saying seriously is up to you. Saying that, he did a lecture in New York when Giuliani was mayor and makes a quip about "the consciousness of Giuliani administration". I could not help being reminded of it when Giuliani resurfaced recently.
- FartyMcFarter 6y ago> it cannot be comprehended by the human mind > ancient civilizations have figured out How did ancient civilizations figure it out, if the human mind cannot comprehend it?
- Sinidir 6y agoSo you're making an assertion about something that the human mind cannot comprehend. Nice contradiction + random dig at people to make yourself feel superior.
- juvenalmuniz 6y ago"Life is a chemical system that uses energy to keep itself from reaching chemical equilibrium." I like the above "definition" from this YT video (This Ciliate is About to Die): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibpdNqrtar0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibpdNqrtar0
- nine_k 6y agoI think it misses the point that's key for my view of life: expanding to reagents around it, so it does not stay isolated in one Goldilocks location.
- proc0 6y agoLife can be defined in terms of entropy. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says it's always increasing, and it was once lower. The law only applies for closed systems, so if we generalize to any system sometimes entropy increases. Life is a system that consumes low entropy and transforms into high entropy [negative entropy]. From light to other life, life is consuming lower forms of entropy to then use it in its information processing systems.
- asdf3331 6y agoSchrodinger wrote about life from this perspective in an article also called "What is life?" I thought it was pretty good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F
- proc0 6y agoYes exactly. It's a great read. Here is the snippet about my other comment (p.25) > Every process, event, happening -call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy -or, as you may say, produces positive entropy -and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is of death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy -which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.