In the book Sapiens there was an interesting thought that life is basically information that is trying to "survive". In the same way you can look at religion as some sort of information that spreads in people minds and without people it would ceise to exist or have even reasons to exist - the same way like a virus is just information that goes from host to host. Viruses can represent the simplest form of what life is actually trying to achieve. I am over simplifying that part of book, but it definitely gave me an interesting different look on life.
I think religion is actually an evolved mechanism for perpetuating (human) life. I developed this theory when my wife and I visited some friends in rural Kansas. We attended their Christian church service and I was struck by the potential evolutionary advantages that would play out if the preacher’s advice was taken at face value: 1) Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric: if only a fraction of LGBTQ individuals were shamed into a heterosexual relationship, there’s a potential evolutionary advantage. 2) Stay-at-home mothers: encouraging marriage/reproduction as the end goal for women likely has evolutionary advantages. 3) Early marriage: again, likely evolutionary advantage.
I find it extremely ironic that the groups most opposed to evolutionary biology are likely a bi-product of those forces.
See also The Meme Machine, which is a book from the 90s (I think) that attempts to take Dawkins' idea of memes to its logical conclusion (and the book has Dawkins' blessing as evidenced by the fact he provides a foreword or at least a quote of praise/approval). I believe the author argues that memes are essentially a new form of life. Genes are the biological form of life that we're most aware of. Memes are basically the same thing, just in a different medium. I'm probably not doing the idea justice but that's the gist of it.
Yes I've long thought that the actual unit of evolution is not the gene but instead the "pattern". Genes are merely a conduit for information. Even through artificial selection, we can "select out" genes we don't want. What remains? What survives? A pattern.
>life is basically information that is trying to "survive"
I've often had a similar thought. What if the panspermia hypothesis were true, what if it were the result of a deliberate action by some ancient alien civilization, and what if their objective was nothing more than to preserve some sort of "message" via the genetic code embedded within all living organism? Someday life evolves to the point where it is able to decrypt the message hidden within those base pairs and it's simply "Orgloxon was here! Stardate 173.4". The answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" turns out to be that we're all just interstellar graffiti.
I often think that from instant zero of the first artefact that could be qualified as life form.. from then to us there's a common structure to solve chaos and persist in time. It's a looong inheritence chain.
but life and religion change overtime, so there isn't any single instance of "life" or "religion" you can point that is trying to survive - other than the whole concept of "life" and "religion" which feels like a non-answer
I meditate like harari too, vipassana multiple times a year.. i wouldnt say its exactly trying, its surviving as it moves through time as matter, to end by transforming all its information into the medium, and begin again. - Its quiet astonishing to be this. Quite lonely to see our struggles as that, there is a senselessness to it, until irs greater sentience reveals itself .. then its terrifying, and that matures into surrender, which is peace. Moving from „it is this“ to „i am this“
A virus is a meta lifeform. It is life that operates given the existence of metabolising organisms. Life operates directly over the physical matter in the universe, a virus just operates a step above this.
Really like this "meta lifeform" idea. I'd suggest it might go further, even into the realm of language, story, and culture.
Might there be a case for claiming language itself is another level of meta lifeform that has grown and evolved within the habitable neural landscape of our mind. Perhaps this is what separates us from animals.
So obscure theories from computational linguists get pretty deep in this stuff. I haven't been able to stop thinking about this stuff since I read about it last year.
Before all the details we need to arrive at the right ballpark and establish the basics. I know on my example that even though I got through school with good grades, I was still full of misconceptions due to a few key errors fed from teachers, bullshit pseudo knowledge I picked up from ufo+mystery magazines and TV edutainment.
So first, there is nothing special about life. Life doesn't break the normal laws of physics we use to describe everything else. Our naive concept is often along the lines of a game engine with inputs coming "from outside", from spirits or something. But there's no evidence of that. Living material is ordinary.
Physics teachers will explain that heat doesn't go from cold to warm places. If you ask how fridges can exist, they may say "well, heat doesn't go there by itself", invoking some kind of magic explanation. Now I know there are more precise phrasing in physics, but that's beside my point. We grow up with a concept that there are things that happen "by themselves" and there are things that happen due to living creatures' actions. In this implicit naive view that many, including past me hold, a fridge does an exceptional thing because it vaguely obeys our effortful engineering intentions. We make it do that, it doesn't do it out of its own nature.
Actually in primary school physics class when we learned the concept of forces, we learned different categories: magnetic, gravitational, "holding/mounting" force, friction force, muscle force... And we had to label the arrows in different everyday cartoons, like a kid pulling a sled in the snow: muscle force towards the kid, gravity down, holding force from the ground up, friction force backward. As if muscle force was some irreducible special magic phenomenon in physics. While correctly teaching basic school-level vector calculus skills they failed at teaching fundamental world view skills.
Because there's no distinction like this. Life doesn't violate the second law of thermodynamics.
Of course this article also doesn't claim that, but as I said, it's important to first arrive on the same page, in the same ballpark before the high resolution discussion.
"Life doesn't violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics" sounds similar to "magnetism does no work". Yet we know that magnetism creates macroscopic effects: a magnet can lift an iron nail, despite it does no work. The way it's explained is that magnetism somehow redirects other forces that do the work. My point is that something can do work without doing work "on paper" because all the work is done by others.
I think that's an insightful way to put things. While getting a chance to do some science with my kids during this crazy time, I was forced to put things into words and (relatively) simple terms for things that I always felt I was lacking knowledge, because of a similar type of teaching as you described. But as I began teaching some simple concepts, I for some reason had a better understand than I ever have, and was able to put them into very simple terms.
I feel like so many teachers are on autopilot with various topics that they don't know how to explain the most simple part of a concept, and instead make it infinitely more complicated and it seems magical.
The purpose of life is for the consciousness to realize that it is part of the whole. There is some form of an attractor force, outside of our immediate 3d world, that is attracting all self-aware sentient entities to become.
Applying western science and demanding evidence when it cannot be comprehended by the human mind is like the petulant child who asks why at the end of every sentence.
Terrence Mckenna is probably the only Westerner who has been able to articulate what the rest of the ancient civilizations have figured out independently.
Life can be defined in terms of entropy. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says it's always increasing, and it was once lower. The law only applies for closed systems, so if we generalize to any system sometimes entropy increases. Life is a system that consumes low entropy and transforms into high entropy [negative entropy]. From light to other life, life is consuming lower forms of entropy to then use it in its information processing systems.
It was interesting to also read his previous article in "Is biology too complex to understand" [1], where he surmises that after the initial "physicsization" of the discovery process in biology, where you came up with the whole DNA, RNA, amino acids (codons), ribosome, protein and related discoveries, there is a lot of complexity left undiscovered and which may not have simplified/abstract solutions/theorems a la physics. This is exemplified with the reported 100+ articles per hour in pub med, which cannot be expected to be understood by a human (or groups of humans) to any significant extent to extend the boundaries of our understanding in a fundamental sense and the hope is that machines (ML) may help us in getting a better send of the discovery landscape and provide insights we may not be able to divine ourselves.
Which leads the the (my) question - what is the current level of development in ML theory & practice to "understand" a particular set of research articles to create a "knowledge database" which can then be used to ask questions about it or relate the consisting articles etc.I know some basic research in NLP like topic modeling, question answering, summarization, information extraction, etc. and perhaps some sort of causal reasoning can be applied, but is there enough progress in this so as to start meeting the goals he wishes for - i.e to be able to advance science by machine processing of research articles as an aid for further insights and research?
How many git repos are published per hour to github? It probably doesn't matter, practically speaking, for you to build cool things. Similar to the results from pubmed.
For a significant amount of synthetic biology, you don't really need NLP or anything. You literally just need to get good at parsing a bunch of XML and text databases, sprinkled with a little bit of data dumps + ML, to be better than the vast majority of engineering done in the field right now.
(Genbank + Uniprot + Rhea -> SQL database you can do some intense things with)
Life is metabolism, so a computer program or a silicon-based intelligence cannot be considered alive by current definition. Either we rework the definition or it will definitely not be alive. Also, sentience and intelligence are two very different things, I think we are very far from having ethical problems with switching off computers (if ever).
The analogy of the question "What is life?" with "What is a computer?" bring up interesting parallels. The author defines a computer as any device that has transistors, RAM, etc that is, the computing substrate. But there were devices that didn't use transistors, but used vacuum tubes or mechanical gears (like Babbage's Analytical engine), which I think are still computers. We have some good theoretical model of computers: like Turing machines. One possible definition of a computer is any device that is Turing complete.
I wonder what such a theoretical model of life would look like.
The analogy goes deeper. Most of us are familiar with the spirit-soul-body concept. Descriptions of the three are very similar to concepts in CS: spirit is the algorithm or an idea - in this sense the spirit is immutable and the same for all devices, soul is the software - it's mutable, implemented in a particular language or framework and generally strives to be a perfect reflection of the spirit, and finally the cpu itself with all the machinery running electrons is the body - it's run by that almost immaterial soul, although no part of that machinery, not even a single electron, is a part of the soul. The connection between the three can be easily understood by CS folks, but is a great mystery for uninitiated (i.e. those who can't code).
There's even a striking analogy of good an evil. "The evil is affirmation of disorder" (Eliphas Levi) and that is bugs and poor chaotic design: software that embraces this disorder, gives up liberty and reason (aka the good) and becomes evil, for evil has neither liberty nor reason.
An unpleasant philosophical discussion* about the multiple definitions or the lack of even one proper definition for one annoying word. It has no meaning! No matter how we define life or being alive, the atoms, reality, physics, chemistry don't change. Say we decide a virus is properly alive -what does it matter? What does that decision affect?
* if it's pleasant, it's probably not a philosophical discussion
I think it's reasonable to recognize genetic replication as being a defining feature of life on earth as we know it today, without ruling out discovery or invention of other possibilities in the future.
If you brought me a blob of something and ask me whether it contained "life," I'd analyze it for DNA or RNA. In the absence of those things I'd look for a preponderance of chirally selected molecules.
Exactly. From cause-and-effect point of view, it's a single chemical reactions. When we categorize living things, we're just putting labels on recurring fractal patterns we observe in that reaction.
"Life" is an english word. There will never be a definition of "life" that includes everything we want included, and excludes everything we want excluded, because there is no distinct corresponding physical thing that it refers to, nor should there be any expectation of one. It's just a word.
My own personal definition of life is the following, somewhat hand-wavy, theoretically weak, though pragmatically strong definition:
Life is anything capable of sloppy self-replication in a sufficiently complex environment.
Viruses are definitely alive. Something like Tierra [1], Avida[2], or modern variants[3] of mutating copying programs come close, giving rise to whole ecosystems of parasites and hosts and defenses, etc. though perhaps they are lacking the "sufficient complexity" necessary so as not to stall out and stop evolving much. Chemistry provides such a massive environment of complexity that it's hard to replicate elsewhere, though I'd argue it's hardly impossible.
The problem with this article's definition is that, with near certainty, the first progenitor lifeform on earth did NOT utilize ANY of the DNA/RNA protein translation machinery they state are necessary to meet their definition of alive. You can find some surpringly good statistical analyses of this assertion in an unlikely ally: creationist statistical arguments. They prove pretty definitively that life didn't begin with a transcriptase protein popping into existence.
What are the problems with my definition:
The big theoretical hole: You could concoct some hypothetical scenario where something I'd definitely agree is alive replicates using some star trek technology that doesn't allow for the "sloppy" part. W/e, I consider this pragmatically irrelevant.
The second big objection: It allows us to consider many things as "alive" that most would say are not. In my opinion, this is actually a major strength.
Ok, but what about things like crystals?
Personally, I consider some type of self-catalysing crystal or quasicrystal to be one of the most plausible forms of original life on earth. That said, they seem to be lacking the "sufficient complexity" aspect. However, are they really? I'm not so sure. Is it possible for a particular pattern of crystal defects to bring about a replication of sorts of that defect pattern elsewhere in the crystal during crystallization? That may be enough complexity particularly when you consider substitutions (when one element in the crystal lattice gets swapped for another). If some type of pattern of crystal defects or quasicrystal or something developed sufficient self-catalysing ability to bring about a form of sloppy self-replication, it's likely that's enough for life provided that the environment allows it under entropy considerations.
I think it's desireable for there to be a zoo of definitions of life. Life isn't a precise mathematical concept, but a family of related concepts.
Self-replication is almost essential, but it's not hard to imagine a future AI that is highly dynamic, intelligent, etc, but does not create copies of itself.
Metabolism is pretty universal. I'd define it as a process that consumes free energy. Arguably viruses don't satisfy this definition. Computers do satisfy it. Most probably don't consider the sun to be alive though, despite it consuming vast amounts of free energy.
Minimizing internal entropy is an interesting one because it's not objective, it requires a model to define entropy. Something can look to us to be high and increasing entropy because we're using the wrong model to understand it. Viruses are static though, so they are definitely not decreasing internal entropy.
I’ve been intrigued by Artificial Life for a while; I feel like it’s the way forward for GAI. I think the ML approach leaves out a lot of what is required to develop interesting intelligence.
The main challenges I see are:
1) With any given simulation, it’s going to take a long time before something really noteworthy emerges, and until then how do you know you’re on the right track?
2) What is the fitness function? This has always stumped me. How do you create artificial resources and competition and life and death to drive evolution?
[+] [-] Daniel_sk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jahbrewski|5 years ago|reply
I find it extremely ironic that the groups most opposed to evolutionary biology are likely a bi-product of those forces.
[+] [-] kaycebasques|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexpetralia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DebtDeflation|5 years ago|reply
I've often had a similar thought. What if the panspermia hypothesis were true, what if it were the result of a deliberate action by some ancient alien civilization, and what if their objective was nothing more than to preserve some sort of "message" via the genetic code embedded within all living organism? Someday life evolves to the point where it is able to decrypt the message hidden within those base pairs and it's simply "Orgloxon was here! Stardate 173.4". The answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" turns out to be that we're all just interstellar graffiti.
[+] [-] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausbah|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idclip|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plutonorm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patcon|5 years ago|reply
Might there be a case for claiming language itself is another level of meta lifeform that has grown and evolved within the habitable neural landscape of our mind. Perhaps this is what separates us from animals.
So obscure theories from computational linguists get pretty deep in this stuff. I haven't been able to stop thinking about this stuff since I read about it last year.
Language as organism: A brief introduction to the Leiden theory of language evolution https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316659539_Language_...
[+] [-] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t_serpico|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bonoboTP|5 years ago|reply
So first, there is nothing special about life. Life doesn't break the normal laws of physics we use to describe everything else. Our naive concept is often along the lines of a game engine with inputs coming "from outside", from spirits or something. But there's no evidence of that. Living material is ordinary.
Physics teachers will explain that heat doesn't go from cold to warm places. If you ask how fridges can exist, they may say "well, heat doesn't go there by itself", invoking some kind of magic explanation. Now I know there are more precise phrasing in physics, but that's beside my point. We grow up with a concept that there are things that happen "by themselves" and there are things that happen due to living creatures' actions. In this implicit naive view that many, including past me hold, a fridge does an exceptional thing because it vaguely obeys our effortful engineering intentions. We make it do that, it doesn't do it out of its own nature.
Actually in primary school physics class when we learned the concept of forces, we learned different categories: magnetic, gravitational, "holding/mounting" force, friction force, muscle force... And we had to label the arrows in different everyday cartoons, like a kid pulling a sled in the snow: muscle force towards the kid, gravity down, holding force from the ground up, friction force backward. As if muscle force was some irreducible special magic phenomenon in physics. While correctly teaching basic school-level vector calculus skills they failed at teaching fundamental world view skills.
Because there's no distinction like this. Life doesn't violate the second law of thermodynamics.
Of course this article also doesn't claim that, but as I said, it's important to first arrive on the same page, in the same ballpark before the high resolution discussion.
[+] [-] frongpik|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrlala|5 years ago|reply
I feel like so many teachers are on autopilot with various topics that they don't know how to explain the most simple part of a concept, and instead make it infinitely more complicated and it seems magical.
[+] [-] f430|5 years ago|reply
Applying western science and demanding evidence when it cannot be comprehended by the human mind is like the petulant child who asks why at the end of every sentence.
Terrence Mckenna is probably the only Westerner who has been able to articulate what the rest of the ancient civilizations have figured out independently.
[+] [-] proc0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vardhanw|5 years ago|reply
Which leads the the (my) question - what is the current level of development in ML theory & practice to "understand" a particular set of research articles to create a "knowledge database" which can then be used to ask questions about it or relate the consisting articles etc.I know some basic research in NLP like topic modeling, question answering, summarization, information extraction, etc. and perhaps some sort of causal reasoning can be applied, but is there enough progress in this so as to start meeting the goals he wishes for - i.e to be able to advance science by machine processing of research articles as an aid for further insights and research?
[1] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/biologists-physics-envy/
[+] [-] koeng|5 years ago|reply
For a significant amount of synthetic biology, you don't really need NLP or anything. You literally just need to get good at parsing a bunch of XML and text databases, sprinkled with a little bit of data dumps + ML, to be better than the vast majority of engineering done in the field right now.
(Genbank + Uniprot + Rhea -> SQL database you can do some intense things with)
[+] [-] juvenalmuniz|5 years ago|reply
I like the above "definition" from this YT video (This Ciliate is About to Die): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibpdNqrtar0
[+] [-] nine_k|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mseepgood|5 years ago|reply
Why does a computer program have to be sentient to be called alive?
[+] [-] namero999|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtsiskin|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm
[+] [-] verma7|5 years ago|reply
I wonder what such a theoretical model of life would look like.
[+] [-] frongpik|5 years ago|reply
There's even a striking analogy of good an evil. "The evil is affirmation of disorder" (Eliphas Levi) and that is bugs and poor chaotic design: software that embraces this disorder, gives up liberty and reason (aka the good) and becomes evil, for evil has neither liberty nor reason.
I'm sure The Matrix used this very analogy.
[+] [-] ssijak|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PoachedSausage|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plutonorm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aftabh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notsureaboutpg|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Traubenfuchs|5 years ago|reply
* if it's pleasant, it's probably not a philosophical discussion
like most philosophical discussions
[+] [-] analog31|5 years ago|reply
If you brought me a blob of something and ask me whether it contained "life," I'd analyze it for DNA or RNA. In the absence of those things I'd look for a preponderance of chirally selected molecules.
[+] [-] douglaswlance|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbh444g|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcphage|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Enginerrrd|5 years ago|reply
Life is anything capable of sloppy self-replication in a sufficiently complex environment.
Viruses are definitely alive. Something like Tierra [1], Avida[2], or modern variants[3] of mutating copying programs come close, giving rise to whole ecosystems of parasites and hosts and defenses, etc. though perhaps they are lacking the "sufficient complexity" necessary so as not to stall out and stop evolving much. Chemistry provides such a massive environment of complexity that it's hard to replicate elsewhere, though I'd argue it's hardly impossible.
The problem with this article's definition is that, with near certainty, the first progenitor lifeform on earth did NOT utilize ANY of the DNA/RNA protein translation machinery they state are necessary to meet their definition of alive. You can find some surpringly good statistical analyses of this assertion in an unlikely ally: creationist statistical arguments. They prove pretty definitively that life didn't begin with a transcriptase protein popping into existence.
What are the problems with my definition:
The big theoretical hole: You could concoct some hypothetical scenario where something I'd definitely agree is alive replicates using some star trek technology that doesn't allow for the "sloppy" part. W/e, I consider this pragmatically irrelevant.
The second big objection: It allows us to consider many things as "alive" that most would say are not. In my opinion, this is actually a major strength.
Ok, but what about things like crystals? Personally, I consider some type of self-catalysing crystal or quasicrystal to be one of the most plausible forms of original life on earth. That said, they seem to be lacking the "sufficient complexity" aspect. However, are they really? I'm not so sure. Is it possible for a particular pattern of crystal defects to bring about a replication of sorts of that defect pattern elsewhere in the crystal during crystallization? That may be enough complexity particularly when you consider substitutions (when one element in the crystal lattice gets swapped for another). If some type of pattern of crystal defects or quasicrystal or something developed sufficient self-catalysing ability to bring about a form of sloppy self-replication, it's likely that's enough for life provided that the environment allows it under entropy considerations.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation) [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life
[+] [-] smilliken|5 years ago|reply
Self-replication is almost essential, but it's not hard to imagine a future AI that is highly dynamic, intelligent, etc, but does not create copies of itself.
Metabolism is pretty universal. I'd define it as a process that consumes free energy. Arguably viruses don't satisfy this definition. Computers do satisfy it. Most probably don't consider the sun to be alive though, despite it consuming vast amounts of free energy.
Minimizing internal entropy is an interesting one because it's not objective, it requires a model to define entropy. Something can look to us to be high and increasing entropy because we're using the wrong model to understand it. Viruses are static though, so they are definitely not decreasing internal entropy.
[+] [-] Gunax|5 years ago|reply
ie. if there was a shower-caddy copying machine, then suddenly shower-caddies could be alive.
In a world with a different life architecture, viruses would likely just be random an uninteresting molecules.
[+] [-] resu_nimda|5 years ago|reply
The main challenges I see are:
1) With any given simulation, it’s going to take a long time before something really noteworthy emerges, and until then how do you know you’re on the right track?
2) What is the fitness function? This has always stumped me. How do you create artificial resources and competition and life and death to drive evolution?
[+] [-] soufron|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ende|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] iamkdev|5 years ago|reply