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There is some reason why things in the universe are incentivized to replicate. The earliest life forms are all about replication, up to now. It’s about more,

by m3kw9 4y ago

There is some reason why things in the universe are incentivized to replicate. The earliest life forms are all about replication, up to now. It’s about more, everything we do is also about more. Maybe it’s a way to create order, because if something is random chaos, you cannot count it. Maybe the math laws in our universe, especially addition is the basis for a lot of why things happen

hobo_in_library 4y ago
It's more of a survival bias. Say, something new comes into existence every 1000 years on avg, with an average shelf life of 1 year. 0.001% of those things can self replicate. The rest can't. After a billion years: - 1,000,000 new objects have been created - 10 of them were self-replicating - There's a 0.1% chance that the current year contains at least one object that cannot self replicate. Chances are there won't be any non-self replicating objects existing in the current year. - There will be many, many copies/descendants of the 10 self-replicating objects Replication leads to survival bias
- EMM_386 4y ago
  The part I can never figure out is how do you get the entire mechanism required to self-replicate, which is not just a couple molecules, to get to the point where it actually does what it "was intended" to do? Meaning, what is 1/4 of that system? At some point, it had to start evolving towards the end result, but the in-between stages would give no survival advantage and likely useless. So why are they starting to form a self-replicating mechanism? It's not like it knows it needs to try to hang onto these currently useless parts because one day after enough generations it'll turn into its "final form" and be amazing. And obviously the entire mechanism required to self replicate doesn't just come into existence randomly at some point and "just works". There must have be many, many years of some sort of "work in progress". I can't fit that into the theory of evolution at all. Yet here we are. I ran it by GPT-4 and it doesn't know either. Gave some theories, but ended it as expected. > The precise mechanisms by which self-replicating mechanisms emerge and evolve are still not fully understood, and it remains an active area of research in the fields of biology, evolution, and artificial life.
visarga 4y ago
Language is also about replication. Ideas have a lifecycle, they get born, spread, evolve and die, but it's a different cycle from that of humans. We act like fertile grounds for language. Up until now language could self replicate only by humans and copying. With the advent of LLMs language gained another vector for replication.
deleted 4y ago
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by m3kw9 4y ago

hobo_in_library 4y ago

It's more of a survival bias. Say, something new comes into existence every 1000 years on avg, with an average shelf life of 1 year. 0.001% of those things can self replicate. The rest can't. After a billion years: - 1,000,000 new objects have been created - 10 of them were self-replicating - There's a 0.1% chance that the current year contains at least one object that cannot self replicate. Chances are there won't be any non-self replicating objects existing in the current year. - There will be many, many copies/descendants of the 10 self-replicating objects Replication leads to survival bias

EMM_386 4y ago
The part I can never figure out is how do you get the entire mechanism required to self-replicate, which is not just a couple molecules, to get to the point where it actually does what it "was intended" to do? Meaning, what is 1/4 of that system? At some point, it had to start evolving towards the end result, but the in-between stages would give no survival advantage and likely useless. So why are they starting to form a self-replicating mechanism? It's not like it knows it needs to try to hang onto these currently useless parts because one day after enough generations it'll turn into its "final form" and be amazing. And obviously the entire mechanism required to self replicate doesn't just come into existence randomly at some point and "just works". There must have be many, many years of some sort of "work in progress". I can't fit that into the theory of evolution at all. Yet here we are. I ran it by GPT-4 and it doesn't know either. Gave some theories, but ended it as expected. > The precise mechanisms by which self-replicating mechanisms emerge and evolve are still not fully understood, and it remains an active area of research in the fields of biology, evolution, and artificial life.

visarga 4y ago

Language is also about replication. Ideas have a lifecycle, they get born, spread, evolve and die, but it's a different cycle from that of humans. We act like fertile grounds for language. Up until now language could self replicate only by humans and copying. With the advent of LLMs language gained another vector for replication.

deleted 4y ago

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