5 ms·

Systems or organisms can be defined as antifragile if they derive benefit from systemic variability, volatility, randomness, or disorder. If that's a riddle, d

• _yb2s 2y ago
  but death isn't a system or organism...
  • fsckboy 2y ago
    >but death isn't a system death is entropy. do you know of a system without entropy? >or organism... boy are you going to be surprised when you answer that knock on the door, eh?
    • BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
      Isn’t it definitely not an organism? If death is the inevitable process from order to disorder, isn’t it deeply a-systemic at its core? If it were a system, it would also eventually have to end.
      • hobs 2y ago
        Arguably it does, the heat death of the universe option would spell the end of entropy, and the end of death (unless you believe in a conformal cyclic universe)
        • BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
          Actually yeah fair enough; I’ll grant that death may be a system.
          • _yb2s 2y ago
            A complex dynamic system has a large number of working parts, and responds in specific ways to inputs and stressors. It just doesn't make sense to think of death itself as a "complex system." They are certainly related- I think death could be seen as an event that irreversibly dismantles a complex system in some way, such that the parts no longer function together as a system.
            • BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
              I was thinking of systems more as just processes that have low-entropy behavior, i.e. those that are predictable in some meaningful way. If one takes the process of death, which is really a behavior of any low-entropy system, to be its own object, I do think that object would be a system under my definition. I agree that yours does not come to the same conclusion, and perhaps my definition of system is too broad.
    • _yb2s 2y ago
      I didn't say that complex systems can't die, I said death itself is not a complex system. Antifragility is specifically a property or behavior of a complex system. "Death" can't anymore be antifragile than the color red can be.
  • tinix 2y ago
    you are an organism that is continually dying. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_succession https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_succession https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restructuring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restructuring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_refactoring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_refactoring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandava https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandava it's all the same shit
    • _yb2s 2y ago
      That entirely misses my point. Antifragility is a property complex systems can exhibit. Concept systems can also 'die' but the concept of death isn't itself an example of a complex system.
• jrsdav 2y ago
  So life as a system benefits from the randomness — but inevitableness — of death, is how I interpret that. Benefits as in, key to its continual perpetuation.
• diab0lic 2y ago
  The whole conversation is very scope dependent. A species can be antifragile specifically because the constituent organisms are fragile. The species evolves not in spite of death and mutation (variation) of the organisms but because of it. At the same time organisms themselves can be antifragile at a different scope. My body gets stronger when I stress the muscles, and gets weaker when I do not. Edit to add… it is also very dose dependent. Zero muscle stress and I get weaker. Some and I get strong. Too much and I get rhabdomyolysis — an absorbing barrier. Same goes for the species. No death means no evolution. Some means evolution. Extinction level deaths are an absorbing barrier.
• morning-coffee 2y ago
  What's the benefit derived from death? I'd suggest death is simply the terminal state that most systems find themselves in after a sufficiently long period of time has elapsed or they've experienced a set of inputs outside the range they were designed to handle and keep operating.
  • seventytwo 2y ago
    Entropy always wins
• lucyv 2y ago
  decay exists as an extant form of life