5 ms·

There is a whole genre of these, starting with (as mentioned in the paper's introduction) "What is Life?" by Schrodinger. I've been idly working my way through

There is a whole genre of these, starting with (as mentioned in the paper's introduction) "What is Life?" by Schrodinger. I've been idly working my way through a bunch of them, including Monod's "Chance and Necessity" (dated but excellent), Nick Lane's whole series of books (notably "The Vital Question"), Nurse's "What is Life?" (good if you want to learn about yeast), Zimmer's "Life's Edge" (haven't finished it yet, seems good). Honestly, the details change, and the emphasis of each author, but they are all speculative and hand-wavey. Pre-paradigmatic. My favorite quote is from "Life on the Edge" by McFadden and Al-Khalili: "Biologists cannot even agree on a unique definition of life itself; but that hasn’t stopped them from unraveling aspects of the cell, the double helix, photosynthesis, enzymes and a host of other living phenomena"

jmcqk6 3y ago
It's a complex topic. I think it really got kicked off with "What is Life?" and we've been able to build more details on it since then. There are many parts of the story that we know in incredible details. Chaos theory, information theory, non-equillibrium thermodynamics, complexity and emergence, auto-catalytic chemistry are all just parts of it, and each one are massive fields of study on their own. I'm not sure there will ever be a synthesis of all these things that creates a paradigm of some sort. There's simply too much.
- ixaxaar 3y ago
  I think the complexity researchers over the years have created a wide range of tooling for analysing complex systems across a large number of domains. Consider complexity economics, computational social sciences, network sciences and cascading networks, evolutionary theories, parts of systems biology, connectomics and computational neuroscience etc. The Santa Fe institute has been at the forefront and has an amazing collections of publications in their own press. David krakaeur's book "Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute" is like a 20 year survey paper and an amazing read.
  - photonthug 3y ago
    I've been on this same journey through the Santa Fe institute pubs on this topic, which all started in a weird place because I wondered what kind of bizarre scientific research outfit had cormac McCarthy on staff as an artist in residence apart from the rest of the conspicuously multidisciplinary luminaries. What a unique, strange, and special intellectual atmosphere they must have had going in their prime and hopefully the best days are ahead still. It seems hard to compare to anything else.. one thinks of bell labs but probably only the peak of the Vienna circle comes close. We need more places with artists, philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists rubbing shoulders in the halls.
    - jgarzon 3y ago
      Santa Fe institute pubs? I’m curious to go there is it open to the public?
      - tsimionescu 3y ago
        I believe they mean "publications".
      - ixaxaar 3y ago
        https://www.santafe.edu/research/sfi-press https://www.santafe.edu/research/sfi-press BTW these books were up on amazon India for like $10-$15 each (books with slight printing defects were being dumped in the 3rd world) so I lapped up the entire collection :P
- johngossman 3y ago
  Agree on “What is Life?” but recently learned that Leo Szilard is the first one to connect entropy and life, in a 1929 paper. https://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.18/notes/computation/Szilard-1929.pdf https://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.18/notes/computation/Szi... Szilard seems to have been involved in everything.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago
  >Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe? Depends on whose expectations you are trying to meet. To some it would be a major transition, to others it's just another everyday minor non-event in the very macro scheme of things. If you're going to look at it mathematically it probably makes a difference when the number of non-extreme planetary environments begins to become significant compared to the number of possible chemical reactions among the limited number of elements in nature. Only one of these numbers can reach truly astronomical proportions.
zukzuk 3y ago
I'd add "Into the Cool" by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan to that reading list. I'm pretty sure that one was originally recommended here on HN, so I guess I'm feeding it back into the echo chamber. But well worth a read!
wanderingstan 3y ago
It’s been a while, but in this vein I enjoyed Chaitin’s Toward a Mathematical definition of “Life”: http://home.thep.lu.se/~henrik/mnxa09/Chaitin1979.pdf http://home.thep.lu.se/~henrik/mnxa09/Chaitin1979.pdf Blew my mind as I started to wrap my brain around information theory.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  The Lex Fridman interview with Lee Cronin "Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe" really opened my eyes. I find myself agreeing with the essential points Lee lays out, that there is a mathematical / physics-based definition for life or life-like systems such as advanced AI and robotics. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGiDqhSdLHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGiDqhSdLHk
  - kthielen 3y ago
    Yeah but, how is an assembly index different than an LZW code?
    - wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
      I think they discussed that in the podcast.
      - kthielen 3y ago
        I don't think they explained how it's different, I did listen to the podcast before posting my comment. It's a pretty basic question that IMHO demands a clear and adequate explanation. If you read the 'abracadabra' example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory ... you could be reading the abstract to an early paper explaining LZW codes.
  - gcanko 3y ago
    I’ve always had the feeling that consciousness is part of the fabric of reality just like time and gravity.
blueprint 3y ago
"life is the process from birth until death" "life is the way to make anything happen to you" without a body (via life), a consciousness cant do anything
- Tepix 3y ago
  If you're merely running in a computer you could still communicate with someone else and do things that way.
  - blueprint 3y ago
    that's called interfacing with a "body" thanks for the downvotes, philosophy noobs
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- illuminant 3y ago
  It is amazing this (perhaps pithy) comment is so down voted, yet you do make one very appropriate observation. Without a body a consciousness cannot do anything. The obvious answer the so-called-science occult refuse to entertain is that consciousness is the universe inflecting itself and life is a subjective scope of potential capacitating this consciousness. Life is the vessel and consciousness the universe peering back upon itself. That is good philosophy. Maybe not "science", yet neither is refusing to believe until someone else explains it to you. Truth is not confined to the horizon of our ignorance, and science is merely our ignorance rigorously explained away.
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    What's a body? It doesn't have to be anything more than ones and zeros.
    - illuminant 3y ago
      Ones and zeros aren't a body. A body is the composition of matter (silicon or carbon or whatever) which has capacity for potential. Potential is where the magic happens. Ones and zeros are states which may be represented by potential.
LASR 3y ago
My hypothesis is that there is some objective definition of these phase changes such that the precise definitions of life etc doesn't matter. My personal stab at an objective defintion: There is a sudden emergence of many more pathways for decay of the universe through entropy. The mechanisms that accelerate the creation of these new pathways is the set that includes "life". Now with that base definition, we can talk about various forms of life - ones that involve DNA for example. But also others that do not.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  That sounds like metaphysics. The Universe doesn't "want" to increase entropy, entropy increase is simply a consequence of applying basic statistics to matter and energy. There is no mechanism that actively explores various pathways for making entropy increase faster.
  - scirpaceus 3y ago
    This is also an argument that didn't sit well with me when I heard Guillaume Verdon / Beff Jezos on his recent Lex podcast state that the universe wants to produce more entropy, and that life evolved the way it has because it's more efficient at producing heat and entropy than, say, a rock. Perhaps he said that loosely as a figure of speech, because it should be obvious (religious beliefs aside) that the universe does not "want" anything. The remaining question is whether the emergence of life as an efficient entropy generator is coincidental to the laws of thermodynamics, or incentivized (in an evolutionary pressure sense) by them. Of relevance, the tendency of matter to organize optimally into energy-absorbing and heat-dissipating structures is a whole theory of its own - see MIT Jeremy England's theory https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...
    - creer 3y ago
      Yes, this "want" of pop science is annoying. I don't see anything lacking with simply using something like "enables", "allows". An environment with sticks allows evolutionary paths that can use sticks. A world with pools of high energy makes it easier for energy-using systems to develop there as opposed to outside of them. A world with light - go figure - makes it possible for light-using systems to subsist.
marmaduke 3y ago
Rosen's Life Itself is another, along with Maturana's work on autopoeisis.

jmcqk6 3y ago

It's a complex topic. I think it really got kicked off with "What is Life?" and we've been able to build more details on it since then. There are many parts of the story that we know in incredible details. Chaos theory, information theory, non-equillibrium thermodynamics, complexity and emergence, auto-catalytic chemistry are all just parts of it, and each one are massive fields of study on their own. I'm not sure there will ever be a synthesis of all these things that creates a paradigm of some sort. There's simply too much.

ixaxaar 3y ago
I think the complexity researchers over the years have created a wide range of tooling for analysing complex systems across a large number of domains. Consider complexity economics, computational social sciences, network sciences and cascading networks, evolutionary theories, parts of systems biology, connectomics and computational neuroscience etc. The Santa Fe institute has been at the forefront and has an amazing collections of publications in their own press. David krakaeur's book "Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute" is like a 20 year survey paper and an amazing read.
- photonthug 3y ago
  I've been on this same journey through the Santa Fe institute pubs on this topic, which all started in a weird place because I wondered what kind of bizarre scientific research outfit had cormac McCarthy on staff as an artist in residence apart from the rest of the conspicuously multidisciplinary luminaries. What a unique, strange, and special intellectual atmosphere they must have had going in their prime and hopefully the best days are ahead still. It seems hard to compare to anything else.. one thinks of bell labs but probably only the peak of the Vienna circle comes close. We need more places with artists, philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists rubbing shoulders in the halls.
  - jgarzon 3y ago
    Santa Fe institute pubs? I’m curious to go there is it open to the public?
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      I believe they mean "publications".
    - ixaxaar 3y ago
      https://www.santafe.edu/research/sfi-press https://www.santafe.edu/research/sfi-press BTW these books were up on amazon India for like $10-$15 each (books with slight printing defects were being dumped in the 3rd world) so I lapped up the entire collection :P
johngossman 3y ago
Agree on “What is Life?” but recently learned that Leo Szilard is the first one to connect entropy and life, in a 1929 paper. https://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.18/notes/computation/Szilard-1929.pdf https://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/863.18/notes/computation/Szi... Szilard seems to have been involved in everything.
fuzzfactor 3y ago
>Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe? Depends on whose expectations you are trying to meet. To some it would be a major transition, to others it's just another everyday minor non-event in the very macro scheme of things. If you're going to look at it mathematically it probably makes a difference when the number of non-extreme planetary environments begins to become significant compared to the number of possible chemical reactions among the limited number of elements in nature. Only one of these numbers can reach truly astronomical proportions.

zukzuk 3y ago

I'd add "Into the Cool" by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan to that reading list. I'm pretty sure that one was originally recommended here on HN, so I guess I'm feeding it back into the echo chamber. But well worth a read!

wanderingstan 3y ago

It’s been a while, but in this vein I enjoyed Chaitin’s Toward a Mathematical definition of “Life”: http://home.thep.lu.se/~henrik/mnxa09/Chaitin1979.pdf http://home.thep.lu.se/~henrik/mnxa09/Chaitin1979.pdf Blew my mind as I started to wrap my brain around information theory.

jiggawatts 3y ago
The Lex Fridman interview with Lee Cronin "Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe" really opened my eyes. I find myself agreeing with the essential points Lee lays out, that there is a mathematical / physics-based definition for life or life-like systems such as advanced AI and robotics. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGiDqhSdLHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGiDqhSdLHk
- kthielen 3y ago
  Yeah but, how is an assembly index different than an LZW code?
  - wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
    I think they discussed that in the podcast.
    - kthielen 3y ago
      I don't think they explained how it's different, I did listen to the podcast before posting my comment. It's a pretty basic question that IMHO demands a clear and adequate explanation. If you read the 'abracadabra' example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory ... you could be reading the abstract to an early paper explaining LZW codes.
- gcanko 3y ago
  I’ve always had the feeling that consciousness is part of the fabric of reality just like time and gravity.

blueprint 3y ago

"life is the process from birth until death" "life is the way to make anything happen to you" without a body (via life), a consciousness cant do anything

Tepix 3y ago
If you're merely running in a computer you could still communicate with someone else and do things that way.
- blueprint 3y ago
  that's called interfacing with a "body" thanks for the downvotes, philosophy noobs
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
illuminant 3y ago
It is amazing this (perhaps pithy) comment is so down voted, yet you do make one very appropriate observation. Without a body a consciousness cannot do anything. The obvious answer the so-called-science occult refuse to entertain is that consciousness is the universe inflecting itself and life is a subjective scope of potential capacitating this consciousness. Life is the vessel and consciousness the universe peering back upon itself. That is good philosophy. Maybe not "science", yet neither is refusing to believe until someone else explains it to you. Truth is not confined to the horizon of our ignorance, and science is merely our ignorance rigorously explained away.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  What's a body? It doesn't have to be anything more than ones and zeros.
  - illuminant 3y ago
    Ones and zeros aren't a body. A body is the composition of matter (silicon or carbon or whatever) which has capacity for potential. Potential is where the magic happens. Ones and zeros are states which may be represented by potential.

LASR 3y ago

My hypothesis is that there is some objective definition of these phase changes such that the precise definitions of life etc doesn't matter. My personal stab at an objective defintion: There is a sudden emergence of many more pathways for decay of the universe through entropy. The mechanisms that accelerate the creation of these new pathways is the set that includes "life". Now with that base definition, we can talk about various forms of life - ones that involve DNA for example. But also others that do not.

p-e-w 3y ago
That sounds like metaphysics. The Universe doesn't "want" to increase entropy, entropy increase is simply a consequence of applying basic statistics to matter and energy. There is no mechanism that actively explores various pathways for making entropy increase faster.
- scirpaceus 3y ago
  This is also an argument that didn't sit well with me when I heard Guillaume Verdon / Beff Jezos on his recent Lex podcast state that the universe wants to produce more entropy, and that life evolved the way it has because it's more efficient at producing heat and entropy than, say, a rock. Perhaps he said that loosely as a figure of speech, because it should be obvious (religious beliefs aside) that the universe does not "want" anything. The remaining question is whether the emergence of life as an efficient entropy generator is coincidental to the laws of thermodynamics, or incentivized (in an evolutionary pressure sense) by them. Of relevance, the tendency of matter to organize optimally into energy-absorbing and heat-dissipating structures is a whole theory of its own - see MIT Jeremy England's theory https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...
  - creer 3y ago
    Yes, this "want" of pop science is annoying. I don't see anything lacking with simply using something like "enables", "allows". An environment with sticks allows evolutionary paths that can use sticks. A world with pools of high energy makes it easier for energy-using systems to develop there as opposed to outside of them. A world with light - go figure - makes it possible for light-using systems to subsist.

marmaduke 3y ago

Rosen's Life Itself is another, along with Maturana's work on autopoeisis.