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Surely nobody was under the impression that detail stops at the nucleic level, right? It's small machines and complex systems the entire way down, ad infinitum.
by 0des 5y ago
Surely nobody was under the impression that detail stops at the nucleic level, right? It's small machines and complex systems the entire way down, ad infinitum. Our ability or inability to render or understand these increasingly small systems does not negate their existence.
- vanderZwan 5y agoI agree with your general sentiment, but I don't see why we should expect "machines and complex systems" (as related to life) to exist at the level below molecules and atoms. If that was the case then we should expect otherwise identical organic molecules to have differences when they're created by living things and synthesis in the lab (ok, ok, there's chirality and carbon-14, but you get what I mean).
- 0des 5y agoI get what you're trying to say, however this is a flawed assumption right up there with just getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. Time and innovation are both not on your side, in this case. Complex systems are complex and extend far beyond the focal depth of our squinting.
- WastingMyTime89 5y agoWöhler proved in 1828 that there was nothing special with organic molecules by synthesising urea. I guess you could view molecular formation as a complex system involving atoms and atoms as a complex system involving quarks. That would define chemistry and particle physics as the study of said complex systems which makes sense to me. Still at that level that’s not generally viewed as the study of organisms. What we view as biology, the study of the mechanisms of life, really starts at the molecular level. If you go lower, things stop being specific enough.
- vanderZwan 5y agoI genuinely don't understand what your analogy is supposed to convey, could you elaborate?
- vurpo 5y agoIt's a reference to an old HN comment back when the creation of Dropbox was announced here. Someone commented something along the lines of "you could just" do that whole thing with the FTP server etc. It's lived on as an example of "peak HN" attitude.
- vanderZwan 5y agoSo any form of disagreement with someone can be reframed as being dismissive and missing the point, and therefore "peak HN". That's quite the non-starter for any discussion about whether an idea holds up under scrutiny.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoIndividual atoms and molecules are identical in a vacuum. Are they in context? They at least have quantum degrees of freedom, which is quite a lot. But whether that has functional value is tbd
- vanderZwan 5y agoA statement like "complex machines all the way down" implies precisely that molecules would be different without context because of some lower-level machinery that forms a more fundamental building block of life. This is what I am skeptical of.
- ramblenode 5y agoThere is an emerging subfield "quantum biology" that studies biological systems under quantum mechanical influence [0]. Photoreceptor systems seem to be a prominent example. [0] https://quantum.ch.ntu.edu.tw/ycclab/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Nat-Phys-2013-Lambert.pdf https://quantum.ch.ntu.edu.tw/ycclab/wp-content/uploads/2015...
- vanderZwan 5y agoI guess my issue was more with the implication that we'll find more fundamental building blocks of life.
- 0des 5y agoAre you more comfortable with the implication that we won't?
- vanderZwan 5y agoComfortable or uncomfortable doesn't even enter the discussion. You can't go down much further without entering the domain of high-energy physics. Which is not the domain of life.
- 0des 5y agoHow so?
- goldenkey 5y agoIt's hard for structure to form in burning hot plasmas. But hell, we only know about ourselves. That's the flaw in all the dogmatic thinking about what life is. Life is after all, just structured computation, and computation is just action, and action..just the passage of observer time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_CQDSlmboA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_CQDSlmboA
- vanderZwan 5y ago
- washadjeffmad 5y agoI'm reminded of an early machine learning experiment where a system self-trained to perform a certain task on a piece of dedicated hardware did so unexpectedly. The researchers "knew" the solution but wanted to learn how their project solved it. At some point, the sensing for analog effects became the most efficient way to achieve the result by exploiting flaws or unique properties in the individual components, sort of like that inductance backdoor where a particular set of instructions in a certain circuit leaks into another until it's energized enough to trigger it like a relay. Anyway, the result was unintuitive but worked. Anyway, there's no doubt that after millions and millions of years, there are natural principles at the quantum and atomic levels that biologics are taking advantage of that we're basically only at the "allegory of the cave" level of understanding. The micro is very much relative.
- dekhn 5y agoI don't completely understand what you are saying; the information encoded at the nucleic level does not have any analogy at the sub-molecular level (IE there is no biological information stored using subatomic particles or quantum tricks), nor do there seem to be any functional contributes to non-information molecular mechanisms.
- EvanAnderson 5y agoI interpreted the parent comment as: Artifacts of the virtual machine that physics / biology / chemistry "executes" on (i.e. the universe and potentially minute physical properties we aren't aware of) may be reflected at the macro-scale in the "output" (life).
- dekhn 5y agoThat doesn't make any sense from a scientific perspection, and reality is not a virtual machine that physics executes on.
- panda-giddiness 5y agoI assume they were referring to emergence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
- 5y ago
- gus_massa 5y agoThere are some known subparts of the nucleus, in particular the Nucleolus [1], and that link discuss a few additional subparts. I'm not an expert in biology, so I don't know if this is a new part, or it's a part that we already know but in mammals is made by small areas of the big chromosomes and in this animals this areas are on their own. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleolus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleolus Edit: nucleolus -> nucleus
- Tagbert 5y agoReminds me of… The Vermin only teaze and pinch Their Foes superior by an Inch. So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey, And these have smaller yet to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum: Thus ev'ry Poet, in his Kind Is bit by him that comes behind. -Swift
- posterboy 5y ago> -Swift Taylor or Jonathan? > Flea > prey > bite'em > ad infinitum What is this telling us about former pronounciation rules? > , in his Kind this feels like it's only there to force the rhyme