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How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

nautil.us

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Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#21

Post by mathgenius »

talles wrote: post #18
rumcajz wrote: post #6

Can somebody explain what does Wittgenstein have to do with the whole thing?

I also felt the Wittgenstein references "thrown" away in the article. I guess the author tried to say that the word "life" has many meanings but in the physics "language game" its meaning is yet to be defined. In other words, defining what the word "life" means is defining what life is.

It seems that any discussion of what "life" is, inevitably stresses the language used to the breaking point. This leads one to ponder the nature of meaning itself. Philosophers certainly have a head start on that one. The scientist solution is to fortify a small subset of language before going into battle, whereas philosophers appear to grow vast fields of language in the hope that meaning survives attack by virtue of diversity.

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#22

Post by jhedwards »

jveld wrote: post #20
jhedwards wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to be pedantic because I totally agree with the idea you're articulating here, but it is misleading to describe Chinese characters as pictographic. The correct term is "logographic" because they are graphic structures that represent morphemes. There is a large variety of character types, some of which are pictographic but most are not. My favorites are characters that visually represent abstract ideas: 上 下 凹 凸…

I recently realized that the logographic misconception about Chinese writing probably stems from the pretty recent past when Classical Chinese was the sole written form, and thus certain characters represented a common meaning to speakers across dialects. Of course, it's still not historically accurate to describe even Classical Chinese as purely "logographic" (for that matter, even Egyptian hieroglyphs have phonetic…

Do you have a source for the logographic nature of written Chinese being a misconception? I understand that many people use Chinese characters phonetically to write their dialect, but when I did graduate work in Chinese the books and linguistics professors all referred to the writing system as logographic. Perhaps this is a new line of thinking I am just not up on.

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#23

Post by gaur »

chatmasta wrote: post #12
jmcmichael wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

word != phrase

There is no such thing as "word" and "phrase" distinction across languages. There are only ideas. In written Mandarin, for example, there are only pictographic characters. Each single character translates to an English word or phrase, but which it translates to is completely arbitrary. It is extremely anglocentric to say "English doesn't have a word" for a given Chinese character, if in fact English has a phrase for…

> there are only pictographic characters.

Only a small percentage of Chinese characters are pictographs. Over 95% are compounds, with the first part suggesting the broad category of meaning and the second part suggesting the pronunciation.

> Each single character translates to an English word or phrase

Each single character represents one Mandarin syllable (with a very small number of exceptions, like 儿), which may or may not be its own word. Hence each character may or may not translate into an English word or phrase.

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#24

Post by jveld »

danharaj wrote: post #14
rumcajz wrote: post #6

Can somebody explain what does Wittgenstein have to do with the whole thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-game_(philosophy) Contrast with his ideas in the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, his first great work, where he boldly (arrogantly?) claimed that all philosophical problems are pseudo-problems caused by misuse of language.

It seemed to me like the author of the article was playing a bit loose with Wittgenstein's ideas. Isn't the idea that gravity is merely a "translation" of the curvature of spacetime an example of precisely the kind of Tractatus-speak that the language game idea was meant to demolish? Or am I missing something.

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#25

Post by eru »

jveld wrote: post #7

> For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods. Writers who proclaim that English has no translation for word x from language y , only to provide a matter-of-fact translation in the very next clause/sentence always make me chuckle. Or they provoke pedantic ire. Depends on ho…

It's never the complicated words.

It's the simple words. English doesn't have a translation for German Brot. The English word bread denotes something almost but not entirely unlike Brot.

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#26

Post by danharaj »

jveld wrote: post #24
danharaj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-game_(philosophy) Contrast with his ideas in the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, his first great work, where he boldly (arrogantly?) claimed that all philosophical problems are pseudo-problems caused by misuse of language.

It seemed to me like the author of the article was playing a bit loose with Wittgenstein's ideas. Isn't the idea that gravity is merely a "translation" of the curvature of spacetime an example of precisely the kind of Tractatus-speak that the language game idea was meant to demolish? Or am I missing something.

The idea the author seems to try to hint at is what i would call a Functor if we were talking about Categories:

- Language games have structure

- Structures can be compared by correspondences/functions

- A particular concept in one language game therefore could be transported along such a correspondence into another language game.

- We don't have a good correspondence between the language games of biology and physics that allows us to transport "life" from biology to physics.

- Or do we!???

P.S. It occurs to me that my analogy with categories and functors is itself a transport between the language game of category theory and the language game of language games.

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#27

Post by javajosh »

alanwatts wrote: post #8
javajosh wrote: post #2

All persistent dynamic structures are fundamentally circular motion. And there has to be an energy gradient to drive the motion against the resistence that is required to reproduce. So, imagine a torus in a bath of molecules such that the torus rotates in proportion to the flux of light through it's hole. The torus rotates not like a steering wheel, but around itself (called poloidal rotation), such that the inside s…

>life is circular motion that has the general character of memory and reproduction. This is totally random but that bit reminded me of a quote from Black Elk Speaks: >Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the sam…

That's lovely, but my meaning is a little more specific and technical, and comes from the singular observation that Life cannot be constructed from unbounded linear motion. The sun shines on the planet, making things move, but gravity pulls it all down again. It's only "circular" in the same sense that a human can be approximated by a sphere of water.

P.S. Would really like to know why the downvote.

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#28

Post by jveld »

jveld wrote: post #20
jhedwards wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to be pedantic because I totally agree with the idea you're articulating here, but it is misleading to describe Chinese characters as pictographic. The correct term is "logographic" because they are graphic structures that represent morphemes. There is a large variety of character types, some of which are pictographic but most are not. My favorites are characters that visually represent abstract ideas: 上 下 凹 凸…

I recently realized that the logographic misconception about Chinese writing probably stems from the pretty recent past when Classical Chinese was the sole written form, and thus certain characters represented a common meaning to speakers across dialects. Of course, it's still not historically accurate to describe even Classical Chinese as purely "logographic" (for that matter, even Egyptian hieroglyphs have phonetic…

@jhedwards: My mistake - I guess I associated the term "logographic" with the idea that modern chinese characters represent "ideas," which is mostly false. My comment was aimed at the "pictographic" misconception, and was meant to agree with yours, which I evidently read too quickly.

In modern written mandarin, each character corresponds to a spoken syllable, which roughly corresponds to a morpheme, although sometimes it seems that without the writing system to differentiate the vast number of homophones in the language, the morpheme-syllable correspondence would get murky very fast. Which is indeed a manifestly logographic element of the writing system

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#29

Post by vacri »

eru wrote: post #25
jveld wrote: post #7

> For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods. Writers who proclaim that English has no translation for word x from language y , only to provide a matter-of-fact translation in the very next clause/sentence always make me chuckle. Or they provoke pedantic ire. Depends on ho…

It's never the complicated words. It's the simple words. English doesn't have a translation for German Brot. The English word bread denotes something almost but not entirely unlike Brot.

The criticisms ring hollow when you have to use a bunch of different languages to show the supposed paucity of English. Does German have a wabi-sabi? Does Japanese have a waldeinsamkeit?

It's a similar thing with animals, when people say humans are useless animals because we can't swim as well as dolphins or see as well as hawks, even though we swim better than hawks and see better than dolphins...

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#30

Post by jveld »

danharaj wrote: post #26
jveld wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seemed to me like the author of the article was playing a bit loose with Wittgenstein's ideas. Isn't the idea that gravity is merely a "translation" of the curvature of spacetime an example of precisely the kind of Tractatus-speak that the language game idea was meant to demolish? Or am I missing something.

The idea the author seems to try to hint at is what i would call a Functor if we were talking about Categories: - Language games have structure - Structures can be compared by correspondences/functions - A particular concept in one language game therefore could be transported along such a correspondence into another language game. - We don't have a good correspondence between the language games of biology and physics…

> It occurs to me that my analogy with categories and functors is itself a transport between the language game of category theory and the language game of language games.

Bahahahahaha! Brilliant.

If I remember my category theory correctly, wouldn't this mean that you've discovered a Monad between the language game of category theory and the language game of language games?

If so, we could create the most incomprehensible monad tutorial yet written! Now there's a real achievement.

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