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No morphological differences between living and non-living systems are yet known
- playingalong 3y agoJudging by the title I thought it would be about past and present organism (non-living and living). But in turn this is about "rocks and stuff" vs. organic life. Inteeresting.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- garganzol 3y agoWhat about computation completeness as in a Turing-complete vs. non-Turing-complete system as a marker of life? Morphology then can be characterized by the presence of features required for implementing computational operations. For instance, Conway's Game of Life is a Turing-complete system.
- pringk02 3y agoI think you are falling into the trap of thinking everything looks like a nail when you have the most familiarity with hammers
- nathanfig 3y agoRight, this just seems like adding an alternate definition of life without moving the morphology problem.
- garganzol 3y agoThe key point is that morphology features can be mapped to equivalent math operations. So we can build from there to formally determine whether a given object can be alive or not.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoInteresting idea, but what reasons do we have to think this would this be true?
- garganzol 3y agoWe can look at a cell as a Turing-complete bio-chemical machine. Given the right chemical substances, it produces the desired outcomes. For example, an intra-cell protein building machinery is very much an interpreter executing code (from RNA). All other stuff like replication, cognition, etc is built upon these basic cellular blocks.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoRight, but how can we tell this is not an accidental property?
- garganzol 3y agoIf we inhibit that property then a cell dies. This is not a proof, of course, but let's call it a lemma.
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago"Turing complete" is any theoretical construct that can do infinite recursion. Such a thing doesn't really exist in the real world, of course, so discussing it outside of the realm of pure math is not useful.
- garganzol 3y ago> Such a thing doesn't really exist in the real world, of course You are Turing-complete, including your consciousness and cognition. But your comment tries to prove otherwise. This situation is called logical contradiction, suggesting that your initial assumption may very well be false.
- fluoridation 3y agoTuring-completeness requires the ability to recall an infinite number of bits, which is obviously impossible in physical reality. A Turing machine with that property removed is a pushdown automaton.
- garganzol 3y ago> Turing-completeness requires the ability to recall an infinite number of bits It does not. The number of available bits just determines the maximum complexity of the system that can be built.
- fluoridation 3y agoI mean, the tape being infinite is part of the definition of what a Turing machine is.
- fluoridation 3y agoCan we unequivocally distinguish computation from non-computation in the real world? What's the difference between the physical processes inside a computer and inside a star that would let us say definitively that yes, one is computation and the other is not?
- garganzol 3y agoFor a system to be Turing-complete, it should implement at least three operations: addition, negation, conditional jump. If there are similar processes inside a star, then yes, that star can be considered Turing-complete. "Computation" is just how we call it in math; in a star, it can be physical gas expansion, thermal convection, etc. But the outcome and its fundamental properties are essentially the same despite different forms of a particular presentation.
- fluoridation 3y agoSo are you abandoning the initial thesis that computation is a sign of life, or are you implying the sun is a computer built by some unknown form of life?
- garganzol 3y agoThe implication is that a star may be an unknown form of life, in theory.
- fluoridation 3y agoThis implies that everything is alive since, like I said, we have no way to unequivocally distinguish computation from non-computation. Are the molecular vibrations in a rock actually computing something? How could we possibly tell? What's more, that rock might itself be a processing element of a larger computer and its own processing elements might themselves be computers, so in fact life exists fractally at all levels of magnification.
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- RagnarD 3y agoReally? Let's see a natural rock formation precisely in the shape of a human being or other animal. There are of course natural rocks capturing living forms: fossils. And a huge number of them are completely obviously from ancient life. Nobody goes to a museum and sees a T Rex skeleton and thinks, Hey, that might actually be rocks that had nothing to do with life. The real issue - not well stated in the article - appears to be regarding single celled life, or at least small-cell-count ancient organisms. Then there's ambiguity in interpretation because of overlap with inorganic possibilities.
- 4death4 3y agoThere are plenty of rocks with a human form. The moai for instance. They’re pretty much universally considered to be artifacts of human life. But I think the point is that, we know the moai are human built because we know that humans are living animals and we know their form. If you don’t know the form of a living being, then you can’t tell if something was produced by a living being based on its shape.
- RagnarD 3y agoFunction follows form. No animal's shape is arbitrary. It's the result of eons of evolution and generally results in morphology quite unlike inanimate objects. When we see a sculpture of something alive - at least a representational one - we recognize it as the shape of something that was (or could be) alive. There's no confusion that it's indirect evidence of life - whoever made it.
- roenxi 3y agoNo boulder's shape is arbitrary either. Everything has its form for some reason. Something like a field of basalt columns sits the junction. They look like a living thing carved them, but that isn't what causes them.
- gilleain 3y agoOddly, the original phrase is "Form follows function", although it was in the context of (human) architecture - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function There is a school of though that says that evolution acts on forms that arise through natural processes. One of the ideas Philip Ball is interested in is how the forms created through natural processes (say, a cloud) differs from those formed partly by evolution (say, a tree). He has a series of three short books on this - "Nature's Patterns, a Tapestry in Three Parts": "Shapes", "Flow", "Branches".
- tigerlily 3y ago> These little tubules can also show periodic cycles of ascent and descent in the liquid due to the buoyancy of an oxygen bubble and its release at the surface. You can observe something like this in macroscale with lemon pips in tonic water. The pip sinks to the bottom of the glass, as it does so, bubbles of CO2 come out of solution and stick to the pip, ferrying it back up to the top. And on it goes!
- pantulis 3y ago> You can observe something like this in macroscale with lemon pips in tonic water. Why, that's interesting, I have never observed this. Do you think having previously added gin to the tonic water solution may have had something to do?
- jaggederest 3y agoThis might sound humorous, but in all seriousness, it is a perfect chance to do some interesting armchair science with a gin and tonic in your hand. Try various lemon seeds, a gradient of tonic-to-gin ratios, maybe a control with water and/or plain soda, measure the oscillation rate (or lack thereof). Break out the statistics and see if there's correlation with the percentage, and whether it's significant and how large the effect size is. Write it up and publish it on arxiv for bonus points.
- manxman 3y agoLet me pour myself a martini while I ponder this.
- selimthegrim 3y agoHow about ten?
- plussed_reader 3y agoDon't forget one for control.
- cjg 3y agoThe first thing capable of evolving was inorganic.
- hnbad 3y ago"Inorganic" is not the same as "non-living" but even taking your use of "inorganic" to mean "non-living", what was the change that distinguished the living from the non-living before it?
- unsupp0rted 3y agoWhat's the difference between something that's barely organic and something that's barely inorganic?
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- permo-w 3y agoif you want to find a morphological difference between living and non-living, first you need to define those terms, and therein lies the problem
- nologic01 3y agoMakes some sense if you consider that the essence of life (the genetic pillar) needs physico-chemical processes to express itself - in fact it is practically "invisible", is more informatin than matter and has limited material footprint without them. Inverting that map, that is, proving that a certain physico-chemical process must have been coordinated and catalysed specifically by genetic processes seems quite non-trivial. But maybe not impossible, at least in a probabilistic way, taking into account some objective measures of entropy or something similar.
- billyjmc 3y agoYou’re getting really close to the ideas embodied by Assembly Theory, mostly developed by the Leroy Cronin and Sara Walker research groups.
- nologic01 3y agoha, wasn't aware but couldn't miss Wikipedia pointing out it is a controversial idea (The 8 Fallacies of Assembly Theory) https://archive.ph/CUMSb https://archive.ph/CUMSb Nevertheless quite interesting set of ideas conceptually
- neontomo 3y agoAs a layman, seems to me that the cutoff for what would qualify as genetic is also a tough question that is more philosophical in nature.
- strogonoff 3y agoIt’s tempting to apply Kantian idealism as an explanation for the evident lack of morphological difference between living and non-living entities. However, if it were true—if the perceived physical entity were more of a simplified apparent manifestation/map of the underlying living entity, and there were nothing special in it that was the “cause”—then presumably we would never be able to create life (or sentience, for that matter) artificially, merely by arranging physical particles in a certain pattern. Have we been able to do that, as opposed to growing more life from already living things?
- drowsspa 3y ago"A living being is something that keeps going long after it should have stopped already" I really like this quote from Sean Carroll. Kind of inspirational as well, for me.
- p0w3n3d 3y agoI think this is not about morphology but about entropy. If we divided organisms on entropy basis we would have the viruses classified as non-living, as they tend to increase entropy.
- timeagain 3y agoHumans light lots of fires, do we increase entropy?
- dmarchand90 3y agoAll organism increase entropy
- fluoridation 3y agoWhat process, living or not, doesn't increase entropy?
- toppy 3y agoThere is a great book on that matter "What is life" by Erwin Schroedinger (of Erwin Schroedinger fame): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F
- bentt 3y agoThe Selfish Gene says pretty much this. https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Popular-Science/dp/0192860925 https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Popular-Science/dp/01928... However, I've never grabbed onto Dawkins atheism as much as come to believe that the ways things "live" is much more diverse and amazing than we can even imagine.
- zvmaz 3y ago> However, I've never grabbed onto Dawkins atheism as much as come to believe that the ways things "live" is much more diverse and amazing than we can even imagine. What has atheism to do with the "ways things "live"?
- Galaxeblaffer 3y agomany religious interpretations of "living" is that it's magic and beyond the grasp of science. it basically boils down to if you believe that life is an inherent property of matter or if you believe that some magic entity makes things live. i know there's a huge gradient in between for most people, but at least for me, i think that might be the root cause (besides a gazillion other reasons) of being an atheist.
- visarga 3y agoNot only religious minds, but modern philosophers too, hold onto dualism - David Chalmers and his "hard problem" of consciousness is a case in point. Here, "hard" signifies what science can't touch, suggesting a distinct domain. Likewise, philosophers such as Giulio Tononi with his Integrated Information Theory are edging towards panpsychism, the idea that everything possesses a shred of consciousness. This, too, is a somewhat religious stance. I personally see no hard problem and believe only certain systems harbor consciousness. The magic element is simply evolution. Evolution, an open-ended optimizer, crafted everything in a singular run. Consciousness exists to safeguard the body and ensure self reproduction, it is the inner optimization loop, the outer one being evolution. That's the link I see between them, they work together and each one is creating/supporting the other.
- Symmetry 3y agoWell, all Earth life involves a lipid membrane with a significant potential across it due to a proton gradient. But of course these exist in non-living contexts too or else there wouldn't have been any way for life to evolve. And we can't be sure alien life would also use this.
- fanf2 3y agoMany viruses do not have lipid membranes.
- klysm 3y agoIt is actively debated whether viruses are living
- thomastjeffery 3y agoBut do any of them reproduce without involving one?
- nathanfig 3y agoOften wonder how much life we've encountered without recognizing it.
- lgeorget 3y agoIt reminds me of a quote in a Doctor Who episode: "[Life is] Nature's way of keeping meat fresh.".
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- JR1427 3y agoWhen watching single-celled nematode embryos under the microscope as a PhD student, I was often struck with a sense of the cell and its innards (microtubles, for instance) being very much like a crystal growing.
- EdwardCoffin 3y agoAnyone who likes this kind of thing might find Freeman Dyson's paper A Model for the Origin of Life [1] interesting. It's a purely statistical model, dealing with the most abstract properties of the component molecules. The summary from the paper: A simple statistical model is constructed, describing the transition from disorder to order in a population of mutually catalytic molecules undergoing random mutations. The consequences of the model are calculated, and its possible relevance to the problem of the origin of life is discussed. The main conclusion of the analysis is that the model allows populations of several thousand molecular units to make the transition from disorder to order with reasonable probability. I got on to this from the bit of his Web of Stories interview talking about it [2]. I listened to the whole interview recently, and highly recommend it. [1] https://www.icts.res.in/sites/default/files/LivingMatter2018-Zorana-Zeravcic-Research-Paper-3.pdf https://www.icts.res.in/sites/default/files/LivingMatter2018... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxlYsAzM_8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxlYsAzM_8I
- mdgrech23 3y agoso the logic implication is this implies we don't/didn't need a divine creator to create man right? Like the molecules were capable of it all by themselves?
- hiddencost 3y agoPeople trying to introduce logic into the study of religion & spirituality do not have your best interests at heart.
- schwoll 3y agoThe church has been using logic in the study of religion for thousands of years. This is no different. One way or another asking questions and thinking about problems is OK.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoI always knew Thomas Aquinas was up to no good.
- woolion 3y agoIf you are interested in reading more about it, the keyword is "abiogenesis" -- or, as was the case in the books I read 2 decades ago, "prebiotic". Reading about it, it is quite obvious that it is hard to think draw up a straight frontier between living and non-living, except for some fairly arbitrary definitions that tend to be wrong in many edge cases. I'm not sure it adds much more to it except that "this is the current scientific consensus". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
- jjk166 3y agoFor those wondering, this article is about the difficulties of distinguishing genuine fossils of single celled organisms from similar looking inorganic features. It has nothing to do with the defining what life is or recognizing forms of life fundamentally different than our own.
- sbjs 3y agoOur models of science are all going to be slightly wrong if there actually is a divine being that intervened in the events of history and changed or updated the laws of nature six distinct times during the genesis of the reality we know and experience scientifically. If this actually happened and we don't account for it, but try to answer questions with the incorrect assumption that the laws of nature have always been static and immutable, we're going to derive incorrect inferences.
- swayvil 3y agoWhat we need here is a good metaphor. No morphological differences between players and NPCs are yet known
- lo_zamoyski 3y agoIf you begin with materialistic[0] premises, it's little wonder that life becomes elusive. Indeed, life becomes meaningless as the concept cannot be accounted for within materialism. Now, if you begin with the common sense view that a rock is not alive, but a cat is, and then switch to a materialistic mode of explanation to try to find the reason why one is alive and the other isn't, you won't get anywhere in answering that question. Methodologically speaking, it should lead you to at least suspect your materialistic premises. I would say that physical living things will need to have morphologies that serve the functions they possess. This much is obvious: I cannot see without the right morphological features to enable sight. But there is no morphological difference between a living eye and a dead eye, so to speak. A dead eye isn't even an eye, because to be an eye is to function as an eye. So morphology is insufficient. The language of materialism is simply too poor to talk about such things. It is too poor for morphology itself. [0] Before anyone responds with indignation, please understand that "materialism" has a technical meaning in philosophical and metaphysical contexts. It doesn't follow that non-materialists are people who believe in ectoplasm or believe life requires ghosts. In short, materialism is the position that all that exists is res extensa. Given the Cartesian view of the world, subtract res cogitans and you have materialism. No one lives completely as if this were true, but if some measure of intellectual assent is given to it, it can lead to very stupid conclusions.
- earthboundkid 3y agoIt’s just Aristotle 101: you’re not going to find a formal cause of life because life is a final cause, duh.
- acyou 3y agoThere is a morphological difference between a dead eye and a living one that adequately explains the difference in function. The morphological difference is that the living eye has oxygenated blood pumping through its live cells. If I can't tell the difference between a cat and a rock re: life, I just suspect my language premises, or my definition of living, not my materialistic premises. Life should be an elusive concept, it's an arbitrary, unclear and problematic abstraction.
- soared 3y agoThis gets my vote for the most clickbait title disguised by sciencey words as not clickbait. I’d be ashamed to title my writing in this way.
- cushpush 3y agoReductive materialist non-consequentialism would be correct if rocks were typing this message equally as well as I.
- acyou 3y agoAre you a human or a server rack? Shall we just send you a CAPTCHA to make sure?
- acyou 3y agoThis is less a problem with AI, and more of a problem with the problematic, arbitrary and very unclear definition of living vs. non-living. I don't expect that applying AI will resolve the underlying issue with the question.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoBeyond a certain point organic forms have a kind of messy distributed recursion that non-organic forms aren't. At very small scales it's hard to tell the difference. The morphology is basically blobby, and blobs look like blobs. But even if you ignore colouration and texturing, it's optimistic to claim that random chemistry can produce something that looks exactly like an ammonite, a moose, or a human. Repeatedly. I would be surprised if there wasn't some morphological entropy measure that predicted this with workable reliability. I suppose the claim is "We don't know where life starts." Which is fair enough. But we certainly know how it becomes more complex as it diverges from non-living systems.
- mo_42 3y agoSomehow it feels like I'm missing out on something here. When I was in high school I learned some definition of life in biology. Later, I realized that this definition does not quite work. Especially, when I see a couple who cannot have a baby. At least one of them would fall out of the definition. (Maybe this could still be alright if we understand life as a flow of genes and not as visible creatures moving around.) Then, I came to the conclusion that there is no binary distinction. Essentially, the difference depends on the complexity of the chemical reactions. A human is probably chemically-speaking more complex than a bacterium. And a bacterium is more complex than some organic chemical reaction. After all, these are all chemical reactions. So I'd attribute something like different shades of liveliness to all sorts of things (not to be confused with panpsychism). In that sense a NN would fit as it computes and outputs floats that represent something gradual. But the text expresses rather something binary.
- acyou 3y agoThat's getting to the core of the question. Both morphology and liveliness are abstractions that we're trying to layer onto natural phenomena. I think the best thing to do is to recognize the abstractions as abstractions, and not try to take them too far. Here, we're asking the AI to reconcile these loose notions and come up with concrete answers. If a person were asked to do this task, they would turn right around and say "Your question sucks". Shades of liveliness helps, but we're still hindered by some arbitrary biases that are hampering thought. These biases are brought on by the fact that we are human, and we want to evaluate things as they relate to us. So we need to impart those biases onto our AI, and it sucks, because the biases don't make underlying sense.
- bookofjoe 3y ago'They're Made out of Meat' (1991) by Terry Bisson https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
- growingkittens 3y agoI believe that this implies the existence of a universal system model. Such a model could be used to describe any system in any state. We are all unique entities made of common components.