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> If you think about it, nearly all things age. Your car. Wine. Cheese. The electronic device you’re reading this on. Actually, no. Those things don't 'age' li

> If you think about it, nearly all things age. Your car. Wine. Cheese. The electronic device you’re reading this on. Actually, no. Those things don't 'age' like you age. BTW, trying to answer existentialist questions with biological theories is futile.

guard-of-terra 11y ago
Existentialist questions can't be solved with existentialism but might well be solved by other realms of knowledge. You could not answer the question "why does plague decimates us", until you could answer "it does not" and the question left the horizon.
reasonattlm 11y ago
Actually, they do age like you age, obviously so for the car and the device where it is a matter of breakage of components, and for the wine and the cheese more a matter of drawing analogies with specific biochemical processes involved in aging. Reliability theory applies very well to aging, just as it does to the aging of machinery, and its high level models reproduce reality quite well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory_of_aging_and_longevity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory_of_aging_and...
deleted 11y ago
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Florin_Andrei 11y ago
At the bottom, it's all an increase in entropy. That's my standard answer, probably informed by my college studies (Physics, not CS). The layers on top might be different, but at the very bottom of things, it's always entropy "trying" to increase. That's why computers eventually break, that's why living things age and die. To counteract this tendency, you'd have to somehow prevent the entropic increase within each system. Technically doable, but the devil is in the details. Life itself fights entropy, the problem is that whatever anti-entropic mechanisms it employs, they're not stable long-term, at least not for pluricellular organisms as separate systems. The biosphere as a whole has actually been remarkably resilient so far.

guard-of-terra 11y ago

Existentialist questions can't be solved with existentialism but might well be solved by other realms of knowledge. You could not answer the question "why does plague decimates us", until you could answer "it does not" and the question left the horizon.

reasonattlm 11y ago

Actually, they do age like you age, obviously so for the car and the device where it is a matter of breakage of components, and for the wine and the cheese more a matter of drawing analogies with specific biochemical processes involved in aging. Reliability theory applies very well to aging, just as it does to the aging of machinery, and its high level models reproduce reality quite well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory_of_aging_and_longevity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory_of_aging_and...

deleted 11y ago

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Florin_Andrei 11y ago

At the bottom, it's all an increase in entropy. That's my standard answer, probably informed by my college studies (Physics, not CS). The layers on top might be different, but at the very bottom of things, it's always entropy "trying" to increase. That's why computers eventually break, that's why living things age and die. To counteract this tendency, you'd have to somehow prevent the entropic increase within each system. Technically doable, but the devil is in the details. Life itself fights entropy, the problem is that whatever anti-entropic mechanisms it employs, they're not stable long-term, at least not for pluricellular organisms as separate systems. The biosphere as a whole has actually been remarkably resilient so far.