10 ms·
Organic/non-organic distinction is arbitrary. Life is just complexity manifest.
by dekken_ 5y ago
Organic/non-organic distinction is arbitrary.
Life is just complexity manifest.
- nathias 5y agoso is bad code, the distinction is about emergent properties
- FabHK 5y agoTo be fair, it was not just "organic", but quite specific organic, namely proteinogenic amino acids that make up proteins.
- Socketier 5y agoThat's a really profound sounding way of saying that life is complex and we don't understand it. Or are you saying that we do understand it? If so I'm sure you're in high demand right now.
- sdhfjg 5y agoAre you ok?
- desertraven 5y agoThis is succinct and quite eye-opening for me. Would you be willing to elaborate in any direction you please?
- 74B5 5y agoSince the beginning of time, things merge. Subatomic "particles" into atoms into molecules into bigger molecules, all directed by physics. Biochemistry, is just chemistry, is just physics.
- zKqGcn 5y agoAnd physics is just applied mathematics! It's applied complexity all the way down.
- bloopernova 5y agoAnd physics is mathematics, correct?
- solarengineer 5y agoI thought physics is described by mathematics.
- goatlover 5y agoIf it's all physics, where does the math to describe it come from?
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoFrom imagination.
- goatlover 5y agoThe physics imagines math to describe itself?
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoHumans imagine math to describe physics.
- datashaman 5y agoaxioms
- goatlover 5y agoThat ignores emergent features, and that it's impossible for us to describe chemistry or biology only in terms of physics. Reproduction is one of the emergent features of biology.
- acceit 5y agoThat doesn't sound right to me[1]. Surely physics + enough detail is biology? Maybe it's not a level of detail we actually understand with contemporary science -- hence the addition of higher level abstractions like biology which are derived "top down" rather than "bottom up" (i.e., empirically) -- but "emergent systems" != "magic". [1]: me: a complete layperson.
- goatlover 5y agoWe should distinguish the field of physics, which is a human study, from the world, which it attempts to map or model on a fundamental level. We can say biology and chemistry are made up of the fundamental stuff of the world which physics seeks to understand, but that's different from saying chemistry and biology are just the science of physics. We have different domains for a reason. How that cashes out in the world itself are metaphysical questions of ontology, emergence, reductionism, mereology and Platonism/universals. Also the status of causality and laws of nature. But then again, philosophy is also a domain of human inquiry. The world is just whatever it is, however we think it best to describe. Problem is that our different domains of descriptions and questions don't always fit easily with one another. So to say it's all just the domain of physics is to mistake one map for the territory.
- nmaleki 5y agoThe commenter is likely referring to complexity from simplicity, best shown in Stephen Wolfram's Rule 30. I'll be talking about this topic, and its implications, at length in an upcoming video on https://recursion.is/youtube https://recursion.is/youtube.
- taneq 5y agoWe’re all just pretentious chemical reactions.
- mypastself 5y agoWe have such a limited understanding of life that calling it “just” anything, at least with any degree of confidence, seems unfounded. Our definitions are somewhat inadequate and full of edge cases and blurred lines. It doesn’t mean we should dismiss them out of hand, especially since the circumstances of life’s origin are so mistifying.
- secondaryacct 5y agoIt s not mistifying that much if you look at the chemical timescale. Give me 2 bn years and see where I go. Try to imagine what that amount of time for random permutation can give in the entire space of the universe and you're bound to have a self reproducing machine popping up once.
- alisonkisk 5y agoThat's an assumption not a conclusion.
- XorNot 5y agoSelf-replicating machines already happened once, in many varieties. It's far from an assumption unless you want to appeal to the idea that they were intentionally created, but that really only pushes the problem further down the stack.
- pfdietz 5y agoThis is a total non sequitur. The smallest organism we know of capable of independent self replication and Darwinian evolution has billions of atoms. The complexity gap from Miller-Urey style experiments to that is enormous, vastly overwhelming mere billions of years. Maybe there's some trick that evades this gap, but if so we don't know what it is, or how likely Origin of Life would be even with the trick.
- XorNot 5y agoWell this seems extremely specious. To presume the entire history of life must remain in existence on a heavily life-colonized world is bizarre reasoning. Any "simple self-replicator" would have long since been exterminated by it's more sophisticated next generation species, not to mention the multiple ages of radically different environmental pressures (i.e. the oxygen apocalypse) in the Earth's history. You're essentially arguing that the absence today of simple replicating amino-acid organisms somehow implies that they must spontaneously form far far more complex systems to do so: yet the evidence says otherwise - we know for a fact and can observe the existence of purely RNA-based enzymatic systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world) which are curiously involved in things like protein synthesis in our cells today.
- sabellito 5y agoIs this your area of expertise? I'm asking because making this distinction does sound useful to me, but I'm no biologist nor philosopher.
- dekken_ 5y agoI didn't say it wasn't useful. My comment is in terms of physics rather than biology or chemistry. i.e. in physics, there is little difference but complexity between a rock and a human.
- enkid 5y agoI don't think that many physicists would agree. There's this whole idea if entropy in physics, which is basically a valuation of information in a system, and humans would be much more complex when looking at that than a rock. There's also a lot more interesting stuff going on inside a human body than there is for a rock.
- dekken_ 5y ago> There's also a lot more interesting stuff going on inside a human body than there is for a rock. Yes, it's complexity, that's my point. > There's this whole idea if entropy in physics I am aware, you're assuming it's not related, whereas I would say it very much is.
- dahart 5y agoWhat does complexity mean, exactly? How does it demark the line between living and not, is there a threshold, and what is the threshold? There’s also a lot more interesting stuff going on inside a car, a computer, or the planet earth that is made of rocks, than there is for an individual rock. Our solar system is extremely complex, yet is not alive. So complexity doesn’t seem to mark the line between living and non-living things at all. Saying life is “complexity” seems reductionist and almost information-free, it doesn’t really explain or even shed any useful light on the difference between living things and non-living things, since there are plenty of examples of high complexity, low-entropy inorganic objects & systems. We can synthesize complexity all day, but we don’t know how to synthesize life yet.
- JimWestergren 5y agoVery interesting. From a book? Please elaborate :)
- gameswithgo 5y agocarbon is probably the only atom with enough chemistry for that complexity to manifest. half of chemistry is organic chemistry
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoBy organic here are meant aminoacids specifically and possibly their polymers.