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Schrodinger answered this comprehensively afaiac - by defining life as any process that consumes order to resist the attrition of increasing entropy. As such th

Schrodinger answered this comprehensively afaiac - by defining life as any process that consumes order to resist the attrition of increasing entropy. As such the scale doesn't matter.

goldenkey 5y ago
Any atomic mass falls under that classification partly. It is storing the energy of E=MC^2 in a somewhat stable configuration, until enough energy is spent to unleash it (exothermic process.) I don't know if these particles consume other particles in the normal sense, but they certainly interact, ie. photoelectric effect and whatnot. One could see the creation of new, higher mass particles, as a form of consumption. The lines get very blurred the more you look at it.
- sideshowb 5y ago
  Is it a form of consumption- only if heat is released I guess? It is presumably a sliding scale, though, in terms of some things more actively consuming order than others. If you want to define a proton as slightly alive, fine, though it's not very proactive in its consuming of things, it just waits around to bump into the right particle at the right speed. An amoeba is considerably more proactive about it, a fly even more so. I'm not trying to retreat to the old notion of "movement" as a criterion for life here, there is something else that defines this scale (given the known correspondence between information and entropy - computation?) I'm guessing Schrodinger had thought about the atomic mass thing, though. I'd check out his very short and readable "What is life?" if you haven't already.
  - goldenkey 5y ago
    I have glanced over Shrodinger's "What Is Life?" previously. Life is thermodynamics, information/entropy/computational like you said. Clearly the lines are blurred and the definition of life in biology textbooks is quite poor. Still, this all begs the question of whether the particles that dominate our universe are species or are inherent from the physical laws. Then when you consider that the laws themselves may be species ..well..shoot me already. My head has begun to hurt.
    - sideshowb 5y ago
      Maths has techniques for dealing with infinite regress - limits as N tends to infinity, fixed points, etc. Intuitively these all seem to rely on a fixed external structure of some sort (e.g. the eigenvectors of M depend on fixed M) but I wonder if there's some formulation of these techniques that doesn't?
      - goldenkey 5y ago
        Maths has the same issue with the primes. Their definition is a recurrence with respect to themselves. If the universe is a "strange loop," like Hofstadter says, then we have very little hope of understanding a snake eating its own tail from our hierarchical models.

Schrodinger answered this comprehensively afaiac - by defining life as any process that consumes order to resist the attrition of increasing entropy. As such the scale doesn't matter.

goldenkey 5y ago

Any atomic mass falls under that classification partly. It is storing the energy of E=MC^2 in a somewhat stable configuration, until enough energy is spent to unleash it (exothermic process.) I don't know if these particles consume other particles in the normal sense, but they certainly interact, ie. photoelectric effect and whatnot. One could see the creation of new, higher mass particles, as a form of consumption. The lines get very blurred the more you look at it.

sideshowb 5y ago
Is it a form of consumption- only if heat is released I guess? It is presumably a sliding scale, though, in terms of some things more actively consuming order than others. If you want to define a proton as slightly alive, fine, though it's not very proactive in its consuming of things, it just waits around to bump into the right particle at the right speed. An amoeba is considerably more proactive about it, a fly even more so. I'm not trying to retreat to the old notion of "movement" as a criterion for life here, there is something else that defines this scale (given the known correspondence between information and entropy - computation?) I'm guessing Schrodinger had thought about the atomic mass thing, though. I'd check out his very short and readable "What is life?" if you haven't already.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  I have glanced over Shrodinger's "What Is Life?" previously. Life is thermodynamics, information/entropy/computational like you said. Clearly the lines are blurred and the definition of life in biology textbooks is quite poor. Still, this all begs the question of whether the particles that dominate our universe are species or are inherent from the physical laws. Then when you consider that the laws themselves may be species ..well..shoot me already. My head has begun to hurt.
  - sideshowb 5y ago
    Maths has techniques for dealing with infinite regress - limits as N tends to infinity, fixed points, etc. Intuitively these all seem to rely on a fixed external structure of some sort (e.g. the eigenvectors of M depend on fixed M) but I wonder if there's some formulation of these techniques that doesn't?
    - goldenkey 5y ago
      Maths has the same issue with the primes. Their definition is a recurrence with respect to themselves. If the universe is a "strange loop," like Hofstadter says, then we have very little hope of understanding a snake eating its own tail from our hierarchical models.