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It's remarkable how much this still rings true today.
The idea that we should try and understand life as a battle against the second law of thermodynamics has had a significant influence on many of today's great thinkers - such as Friston [1] and Dennett [2], as well as countless others.
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.201...
I've heard this called the "every refrigerator is a miracle" theory.
I don't see anything on this phrase on Google Search
Would phenomena like rocks crystallizing or stars forming also be a battle against the second law of thermodynamics?
Not sure.
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, in his Aufbau der Physik argues/shows that the 2nd law is often misunderstood as leading to "goo". His take is that this is not so, rather it leads to skeletons.
So rocks crystallising and stars forming would actually be going with the flow of the 2nd law, rather than battling against it.
Stars die, so I'm not sure why your example includes stars forming -- that's not a steady state.
Still, rocks and crystals are not quite an end state either, in a non expanding universe -- eventually they collide and crumble to dust.
Thermodynamics and heat dissipation also play a central role in Jeremy England’s work on abiogenesis.
Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F
"In the book, Schrödinger introduced the idea of an "aperiodic crystal" that contained genetic information in its configuration of covalent chemical bonds."
Good to see it available (a classic; not so easy to lay hands on)
It is also being released as an audiobook. Release date: 22 Jan 2019.
https://www.amazon.com/What-Life-Matter-Autobiographical-Ske...
Freeman Dyson reviews and extends "What is Life?" in his "Origins of Life," both a lecture[1] and a book.
[1] http://inspirehep.net/record/1268726/files/978-4-431-77056-5...
Our definition of life is very narrow, mostly self-referential. Life is everything. Just because we can't consciously communicate with something it doesn't mean it's not alive. Why wouldn't Earth be alive? How about the sun, the stars and the universe?
We love separating things by arbitrarily naming and defining them, but the universe is completely connected, we can't exist outside of it or disconnected from it. If anything, the only life that exists is the entire universe and we are just tiny tiny pieces of it with a very limited view and awareness of the whole. Pretty much the same way we are made up of billions of cells that likely have no way of perceiving the human body they are a part of (or "having a conversation" with it).
I think this has little to do with narrow-mindedness or anything along those lines, and a lot more to do with the fact that definitions for words exist to facilitate communication. If I redefine life to include, say, my computer, I ought to have a very good reason to do this; otherwise, I'm just going to confuse people, and end up giving a full explanation every time I use the term 'life'.
Basically, this concept looks at the causality of language in reverse.
This is so true, and key. So many people think about themselves and systems in general as being separate when logically there isn't even such a thing, at least not in the relevant context. You're looking at a a system and how it interacts with a larger system its a part of, how does that interaction take place? Well, either both systems are actually one, or there is absolutely no interaction, and looking at both systems at once is only interesting maybe to see what is similar or different between them. Basically, its always all or nothing, part of the whole, or not.
This is just a language issue. A fun technique: try to have this discussion with someone while banning the word “life” and its derivatives from the discussion.
It usually turns out that you’re arguing over the preferred definition of an English word, and you can actually find a point of agreement on the underlying models.
Banning the root word of the domain is my favorite way of discussing any controversial topic.
Try discussing religion with someone of a different faith without invoking God(s) or any specific prophets. It turns out that you're left with origin theories, a system of morals, and a mostly observations-based prototype to modern science.
Now try international politics without using the terms war, peace, or border.
Now we should ban the word favourite here.
Exactly. The definition of life that is taught in school and widely cited is very limited to simply what we traditionally consider alive. But where are fr he lines drawn? Must life be conscious, or at least experience qualia? Does conciousness get more "real" in more complex organisms? (Is a fly just as alive as a horse is?) Why do we consider viruses to be not alive? Are our own bodies' cells alive? In what way? The system is very complicated and we answer is with a hand-waving simple definition.
The lines are drawn based on what biology we have available to us. If we ever discover alien biology, the lines might be drawn more broadly. But we don't know until then.
It's still a bit arbitrary. Why is the water cycle in a mountain/coud/river not a living process, but the ATP cycle in a cell is?
I think you may be familiar with the Global Brain hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain): what if the Earth is a large network system? And you know, the network is the computer...
Given the current empirical evidences we have, it's not particularity persuasive, but an extremely interesting imagination and proposal indeed.
The mice would like to have a word with you[42]
[42]https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/1MmQjXrkwp98jNdc17...
What if even stars in a galaxy form a communicative network, communication meaning sending and reacting to signals on a purely physical basis which doesn't translate to a meaning to us yet. Gravity waves, electromagnetic signals, signals we are not aware of... I am not saying stars talk gossip but that there could be a signal exchange and a systemic reaction. We see it in practically all life forms on Earth and a in a way in the non-alive world as well when you look at the climate, for example.
I mean, when I speak I physically interact and transmit signals through air vibrations which we developed to both detect and interpret. Other perceptive "life" forms would have a hard time telling what we communicate about as well. Hell, we can barely if at all understand what other mammals communicate about despite their biophysical systems being incredibly similar to our own. Plants communicate with chemical signals and root/fungi networks.
Predicted pictures of the universe at large look eerily like the brain's structure as well.
Certainly everything with gravitational mass or electromagnetic energy communicates with others via the waves and particles of physics. The question is only in the complexity of these messages compared to biological and psychological processes.
You're changing the meaning of the word to suit your philosophy.
Conflating life with the ability to communicate is like conflating computing with browsing the web.
Sure. But you have nothing to sustain your argument. It is very broad and given how big the Universe is, probably, unverifiable. That's like a cell with cell resources trying to find out its place in the human body.
> Life is everything.
No it isn't, a rock is not alive.
> Just because we can't consciously communicate with something it doesn't mean it's not alive.
Strawman, no one thinks life requires communication.
> Why wouldn't Earth be alive?
Because it's not, it's a big rock, it has life on the surface, but is not itself alive.
> We love separating things by arbitrarily naming and defining them, but the universe is completely connected, we can't exist outside of it or disconnected from it.
More strawmen.
> If anything, the only life that exists is the entire universe and we are just tiny tiny pieces of it with a very limited view and awareness of the whole.
The universe is not alive.
What's clear is that you just don't know what you're saying, you're just pontificating woo woo.
Life self replicates, metabolizes something for energy, and grows through cellular division. None of the things you just called alive do that, so they're not alive; you don't get to change the meaning of the word life to suit your narrative.
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to Hacker News? You've done it a lot, and it's tedious and grating.
I took a course on History of Science and I was pretty shocked to learn that Watson, Crick and Wilkins were deeply impacted by this book. That type of cross pollination between disciplines and generations of scientists is fascinating.
I remember finding a first edition of this in my university library during undergrad after reading the likes of Watson/Crick describe it as fundamental in their path. What bowled me over was that each paragraph in that edition - and so very likely the ones they read as well - was marked with a section symbol (§), itself closely resembling a double helix. At the time it felt profound that their conclusion was likely implied by the circumstances of their beginning.
A miserable pile of organic molecules. But enough talk...Have at you!
What is life? A forkbomb implemented in hardware.
Structure is opportunistic in the sense that it results from energy bleeding out from the big bang into other fields, not only quantum fields but things like position - thus we get large scale isotropy.
I followed Shrodinger's ethos to its limits and all I got was perfectly isotropic relativistic spacetime foam.
I suppose that's what our universe will eventually decay into - and then what happens is up to anyones interpretation (conformal cyclic cosmology or what have you..)
I need to implement gravity, some type of coupling that can prevent equipartition of states from happening so quickly.
In any case, nothing interesting happens in small universes by the process of evolution. Evolution requires a balance between specifity of search/selectivity and magnitude. Less specificity will require more brute force magnitude. Just like any search of a space or data struct. Silicon just doesn't have the magnitude that even a mole of molecules does. Not even in the same ballpark.
The source is up here and easily portable to platform other than Windows
https://github.com/churchofthought/ScatterLife
I need to update the video - the video is before I added a projection matrix to fix the hexagonal skew.
Another framework but using complex valued cells: https://github.com/churchofthought/HexagonalComplexAutomata