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In 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

In 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 ago
Yes 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 ago
  In 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.
  - kneel 6y ago
    This is how Jesus/Buddha/Mohammed are real, not because all the stories about them are true or that they are actually divine. But because they are actual self propagating ideas promoted by real physical people.
    - patcon 6y ago
      Neat! I haven't seen this idea out in the world much, but a book called "Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything" kinda runs at this from a neat science-rooted philosophy perspective. It basically says that any philosophical framework needs to have just as much to say about fictional beings as it does physical, since fictional constructs certainly affect us. I'd just never run across that idea before that book, but is there a specific place you came across it? :)
      - frimsah 6y ago
        Interesting. In some circles of psychology and mythology, such as in reading Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, there is an importance given to fiction because stories will affect people's lives in a profound way. The way I understand this view is that any information - whether objectively observed, or subjectively interpreted - which is meaningful deserves to be honored and understood.
      - kneel 6y ago
        >I'd just never run across that idea before that book, but is there a specific place you came across it? :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa This is dancing on the edge of reality and metaphysics, I think the subject is fascinating since so much of our world is dominated by narratives.. real or imagined.
    - rmah 6y ago
      Aren't you just redefining the word "real" there to mean "the idea exists" instead of "a physical person existed"? But by that definition, Han Solo and Bilbo Baggins are also "real". At what point do we simply use a different word for "physically exists"?
      - kneel 6y ago
        Almost, Star Wars and LOTR are not really self propelling ideas that guide populations of people. The information is there, it's just not nearly as memetic. Although I would say that Star Wars has inspired a lot of space exploration, it's not nearly as viral as something like Christianity.
- dllthomas 6y ago
  If I follow you, this is basically the notion of a "replicator" that Dawkins talked about at length (and maybe coined?) - if you haven't read The Selfish Gene, I recommend checking it out.
- PoachedSausage 6y ago
  I don't think we have fully grasped what information really is yet, almost like fish that have just become aware of the ocean. After finishing James Gleick's excellent The Information (mentioned recently on HN), I came away wanting more. There doesn't seem to be more because humans haven't figured it out yet.
  - patcon 6y ago
    Santa Fe Institute! Highly recommend the Complexity podcast. So much good stuff that all dovetails with Gleick's stuff <3 My recent favourite contained an analogy by researcher Sara Imari Walker, who had this great line about how "If you want to understand gravity, you look to black holes, since they're the densest known objects where gravity acts insanely strongly compared to all other forces. In the same way, if you want to study information and how it operates in the world, you need to study life."
    - PoachedSausage 6y ago
      Thanks. I'll have to check that out.
- patcon 6y ago
  Yeah! I feel very similarly. You might get a kick out of this post by a man who works adjacent to Sante Fe Institute folks. This guy takes it to the next level and makes you almost start to think of "non-living" things as "participating" in this dance of living with us as non-passive structural actors. https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/ https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/ > For example, the [mud hut] structure’s inhabitant (also a volatile structure), may use the structure as a residence. If the structure succeeds in protecting the inhabitant from the degrading effects of the environment then the inhabitant will be better able to conserve energy, which may be directed toward the repair of the structure. On the other hand, if the structure fails to increase the inhabitant’s ability to dissipate energy, for example by requiring the inhabitant to spend more time on its repair than on obtaining food and resources (free energy), then the structure can be seen as participating in its own destruction (2nd Law). In the event of death or sickness of the inhabitant, the structure will decay back into the homogeneous state from where it came.
idclip 6y ago
I meditate like harari too, vipassana multiple times a year.. i wouldnt say its exactly trying, its surviving as it moves through time as matter, to end by transforming all its information into the medium, and begin again. - Its quiet astonishing to be this. Quite lonely to see our struggles as that, there is a senselessness to it, until irs greater sentience reveals itself .. then its terrifying, and that matures into surrender, which is peace. Moving from „it is this“ to „i am this“
jahbrewski 6y ago
I think religion is actually an evolved mechanism for perpetuating (human) life. I developed this theory when my wife and I visited some friends in rural Kansas. We attended their Christian church service and I was struck by the potential evolutionary advantages that would play out if the preacher’s advice was taken at face value: 1) Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric: if only a fraction of LGBTQ individuals were shamed into a heterosexual relationship, there’s a potential evolutionary advantage. 2) Stay-at-home mothers: encouraging marriage/reproduction as the end goal for women likely has evolutionary advantages. 3) Early marriage: again, likely evolutionary advantage. I find it extremely ironic that the groups most opposed to evolutionary biology are likely a bi-product of those forces.
- patcon 6y ago
  re: religion being evolutionarily advantageous. Totally. Though with your specific 3 points, I respectfully suggest you're missing the forest for the trees. The specific stories we tell through religion don't always matter as much as the aggregate power of enacting and conjuring them together. Sometimes strong-willed and stubborn groups are what was needed to thread a needle through an important time in history. Many of the specific stories that emerged through that stubbornness might be no more than vestigial features -- feature that have no direct purpose, but as products of some underlying third factor. For example, the old testament version of christianity was perhaps the right thing for that time, and the new testament person of Jesus was perhaps the right iteration of Christianity for that time. These stories suited the human network of the time, which perhaps had very different network structure -- the lawless chaos of man and nature during old testament times (in which strict codes were needed to gel society), vs the rigid and dominant social stratification and class conflict/divides of New Testament times (in which Jesus' teachings helped knit together a fractured social network). In case these things are of interest, there are some fields delving into this stuff: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276494993_Structures_of_Human_Societies https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276494993_Structure...
  - monkeynotes 6y ago
    I think this is why technology and science is the new religion we all live by. Technology has the potential to perpetuate information indefinitely. Organic life bootstrapped the path to inorganic life and beyond. Religion served its purpose and no longer feels relevant in light of technology and science.
DebtDeflation 6y ago
>life is basically information that is trying to "survive" I've often had a similar thought. What if the panspermia hypothesis were true, what if it were the result of a deliberate action by some ancient alien civilization, and what if their objective was nothing more than to preserve some sort of "message" via the genetic code embedded within all living organism? Someday life evolves to the point where it is able to decrypt the message hidden within those base pairs and it's simply "Orgloxon was here! Stardate 173.4". The answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" turns out to be that we're all just interstellar graffiti.
ausbah 6y ago
but life and religion change overtime, so there isn't any single instance of "life" or "religion" you can point that is trying to survive - other than the whole concept of "life" and "religion" which feels like a non-answer
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  That's a problem with our categories, though. We assign static labels to pieces of a dynamic system. All what we consider life is essentially one big ongoing chemical reaction. We are just repetitive patterns in it, and we see repetitive patterns in it, and we label these patterns. But these patterns are changing in a way imperceptible to us, until at some point we realize the thing we're looking at is different than what it was in the past. Religion could be viewed in the same way. We see stable, slowly changing patterns in the information flow. Patterns that tend to turn noise into more copies of themselves. It's also important to remember that when we say that some life form or piece of information is "trying to survive", we're anthropomorphizing it. The pattern doesn't have a will and isn't trying anything. The interactions between the pattern and the noise, or other patterns, tend to yield something similar to the original pattern in question. (That's all a sophisticated way of saying that life is like Game of Life, where we identify interesting structures and give them a name - but in code, those structures don't exist in the first place. It's just a grid and a set of rules.)
kaycebasques 6y ago
See also The Meme Machine, which is a book from the 90s (I think) that attempts to take Dawkins' idea of memes to its logical conclusion (and the book has Dawkins' blessing as evidenced by the fact he provides a foreword or at least a quote of praise/approval). I believe the author argues that memes are essentially a new form of life. Genes are the biological form of life that we're most aware of. Memes are basically the same thing, just in a different medium. I'm probably not doing the idea justice but that's the gist of it.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  I think you've made a good summary. And it leads to some interesting perspectives. SSC classic, The Toxoplasma of Rage[0], explores this a bit. One fragment that burned into my mind is the few paragraphs reinterpreting the War on Terror as a parasite with multi-stage life cycle (like toxoplasma). To quote a part: > From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop. -- [0] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
agumonkey 6y ago
I often think that from instant zero of the first artefact that could be qualified as life form.. from then to us there's a common structure to solve chaos and persist in time. It's a looong inheritence chain.

alexpetralia 6y ago

Yes 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 ago
In 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.
- kneel 6y ago
  This is how Jesus/Buddha/Mohammed are real, not because all the stories about them are true or that they are actually divine. But because they are actual self propagating ideas promoted by real physical people.
  - patcon 6y ago
    Neat! I haven't seen this idea out in the world much, but a book called "Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything" kinda runs at this from a neat science-rooted philosophy perspective. It basically says that any philosophical framework needs to have just as much to say about fictional beings as it does physical, since fictional constructs certainly affect us. I'd just never run across that idea before that book, but is there a specific place you came across it? :)
    - frimsah 6y ago
      Interesting. In some circles of psychology and mythology, such as in reading Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, there is an importance given to fiction because stories will affect people's lives in a profound way. The way I understand this view is that any information - whether objectively observed, or subjectively interpreted - which is meaningful deserves to be honored and understood.
    - kneel 6y ago
      >I'd just never run across that idea before that book, but is there a specific place you came across it? :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa This is dancing on the edge of reality and metaphysics, I think the subject is fascinating since so much of our world is dominated by narratives.. real or imagined.
  - rmah 6y ago
    Aren't you just redefining the word "real" there to mean "the idea exists" instead of "a physical person existed"? But by that definition, Han Solo and Bilbo Baggins are also "real". At what point do we simply use a different word for "physically exists"?
    - kneel 6y ago
      Almost, Star Wars and LOTR are not really self propelling ideas that guide populations of people. The information is there, it's just not nearly as memetic. Although I would say that Star Wars has inspired a lot of space exploration, it's not nearly as viral as something like Christianity.
dllthomas 6y ago
If I follow you, this is basically the notion of a "replicator" that Dawkins talked about at length (and maybe coined?) - if you haven't read The Selfish Gene, I recommend checking it out.
PoachedSausage 6y ago
I don't think we have fully grasped what information really is yet, almost like fish that have just become aware of the ocean. After finishing James Gleick's excellent The Information (mentioned recently on HN), I came away wanting more. There doesn't seem to be more because humans haven't figured it out yet.
- patcon 6y ago
  Santa Fe Institute! Highly recommend the Complexity podcast. So much good stuff that all dovetails with Gleick's stuff <3 My recent favourite contained an analogy by researcher Sara Imari Walker, who had this great line about how "If you want to understand gravity, you look to black holes, since they're the densest known objects where gravity acts insanely strongly compared to all other forces. In the same way, if you want to study information and how it operates in the world, you need to study life."
  - PoachedSausage 6y ago
    Thanks. I'll have to check that out.
patcon 6y ago
Yeah! I feel very similarly. You might get a kick out of this post by a man who works adjacent to Sante Fe Institute folks. This guy takes it to the next level and makes you almost start to think of "non-living" things as "participating" in this dance of living with us as non-passive structural actors. https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/ https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/ > For example, the [mud hut] structure’s inhabitant (also a volatile structure), may use the structure as a residence. If the structure succeeds in protecting the inhabitant from the degrading effects of the environment then the inhabitant will be better able to conserve energy, which may be directed toward the repair of the structure. On the other hand, if the structure fails to increase the inhabitant’s ability to dissipate energy, for example by requiring the inhabitant to spend more time on its repair than on obtaining food and resources (free energy), then the structure can be seen as participating in its own destruction (2nd Law). In the event of death or sickness of the inhabitant, the structure will decay back into the homogeneous state from where it came.

idclip 6y ago

I meditate like harari too, vipassana multiple times a year.. i wouldnt say its exactly trying, its surviving as it moves through time as matter, to end by transforming all its information into the medium, and begin again. - Its quiet astonishing to be this. Quite lonely to see our struggles as that, there is a senselessness to it, until irs greater sentience reveals itself .. then its terrifying, and that matures into surrender, which is peace. Moving from „it is this“ to „i am this“

jahbrewski 6y ago

I think religion is actually an evolved mechanism for perpetuating (human) life. I developed this theory when my wife and I visited some friends in rural Kansas. We attended their Christian church service and I was struck by the potential evolutionary advantages that would play out if the preacher’s advice was taken at face value: 1) Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric: if only a fraction of LGBTQ individuals were shamed into a heterosexual relationship, there’s a potential evolutionary advantage. 2) Stay-at-home mothers: encouraging marriage/reproduction as the end goal for women likely has evolutionary advantages. 3) Early marriage: again, likely evolutionary advantage. I find it extremely ironic that the groups most opposed to evolutionary biology are likely a bi-product of those forces.

patcon 6y ago
re: religion being evolutionarily advantageous. Totally. Though with your specific 3 points, I respectfully suggest you're missing the forest for the trees. The specific stories we tell through religion don't always matter as much as the aggregate power of enacting and conjuring them together. Sometimes strong-willed and stubborn groups are what was needed to thread a needle through an important time in history. Many of the specific stories that emerged through that stubbornness might be no more than vestigial features -- feature that have no direct purpose, but as products of some underlying third factor. For example, the old testament version of christianity was perhaps the right thing for that time, and the new testament person of Jesus was perhaps the right iteration of Christianity for that time. These stories suited the human network of the time, which perhaps had very different network structure -- the lawless chaos of man and nature during old testament times (in which strict codes were needed to gel society), vs the rigid and dominant social stratification and class conflict/divides of New Testament times (in which Jesus' teachings helped knit together a fractured social network). In case these things are of interest, there are some fields delving into this stuff: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276494993_Structures_of_Human_Societies https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276494993_Structure...
- monkeynotes 6y ago
  I think this is why technology and science is the new religion we all live by. Technology has the potential to perpetuate information indefinitely. Organic life bootstrapped the path to inorganic life and beyond. Religion served its purpose and no longer feels relevant in light of technology and science.

DebtDeflation 6y ago

>life is basically information that is trying to "survive" I've often had a similar thought. What if the panspermia hypothesis were true, what if it were the result of a deliberate action by some ancient alien civilization, and what if their objective was nothing more than to preserve some sort of "message" via the genetic code embedded within all living organism? Someday life evolves to the point where it is able to decrypt the message hidden within those base pairs and it's simply "Orgloxon was here! Stardate 173.4". The answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" turns out to be that we're all just interstellar graffiti.

ausbah 6y ago

but life and religion change overtime, so there isn't any single instance of "life" or "religion" you can point that is trying to survive - other than the whole concept of "life" and "religion" which feels like a non-answer

TeMPOraL 6y ago
That's a problem with our categories, though. We assign static labels to pieces of a dynamic system. All what we consider life is essentially one big ongoing chemical reaction. We are just repetitive patterns in it, and we see repetitive patterns in it, and we label these patterns. But these patterns are changing in a way imperceptible to us, until at some point we realize the thing we're looking at is different than what it was in the past. Religion could be viewed in the same way. We see stable, slowly changing patterns in the information flow. Patterns that tend to turn noise into more copies of themselves. It's also important to remember that when we say that some life form or piece of information is "trying to survive", we're anthropomorphizing it. The pattern doesn't have a will and isn't trying anything. The interactions between the pattern and the noise, or other patterns, tend to yield something similar to the original pattern in question. (That's all a sophisticated way of saying that life is like Game of Life, where we identify interesting structures and give them a name - but in code, those structures don't exist in the first place. It's just a grid and a set of rules.)

kaycebasques 6y ago

See also The Meme Machine, which is a book from the 90s (I think) that attempts to take Dawkins' idea of memes to its logical conclusion (and the book has Dawkins' blessing as evidenced by the fact he provides a foreword or at least a quote of praise/approval). I believe the author argues that memes are essentially a new form of life. Genes are the biological form of life that we're most aware of. Memes are basically the same thing, just in a different medium. I'm probably not doing the idea justice but that's the gist of it.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
I think you've made a good summary. And it leads to some interesting perspectives. SSC classic, The Toxoplasma of Rage[0], explores this a bit. One fragment that burned into my mind is the few paragraphs reinterpreting the War on Terror as a parasite with multi-stage life cycle (like toxoplasma). To quote a part: > From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop. -- [0] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...

agumonkey 6y ago

I often think that from instant zero of the first artefact that could be qualified as life form.. from then to us there's a common structure to solve chaos and persist in time. It's a looong inheritence chain.