31–40 of 204 posts
We still don't know if the Universe itself isn't a living organism with us playing the role of tiny viruses that require intelligence/consciousness to fulfill certain tasks, like what gut bacteria does for us.
Personally, the last few years, I have felt that working to understand how all phenomena can be sketched out on the log scale has helped me gain a deeper understanding of the world. Of course, this goes hand in hand with related ideas, such as having a generally skeptical mindset, seeking first principles, etc.
These ideas has been very powerful for me, and I thought it might be worth sharing.
P.S. the book "The Black Cloud", mentioned in the article, is a really fun and quick read. I recommend it for any sci-fi fans.
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As I understand it, quantum entanglement doesn't allow for affecting causality faster than the speed of light. So that doesn't solve the problem. Your comment doesn't really give accurate credit to the current state of knowledge.
Yeah, it was kinda stupid in this context; I meant to show that some actions are happening "immediately" even across huge distances and not that we need to wait for e.g. gravitational waves to move at the speed of light. Not that we can actually utilize this for conveying information immediately.
Yes, quantum entanglement doesn't seem to allow for transmission of information in the conventional sense. However...
Take a universe full of particles, many of which are entangled with each other. If you consider the entanglement as primary you can think of the entangled particles as single entities that have "extensions" into space-time that can be widely separated. I don't think it's at all clear that "living" processes cannot be carried out on this "substratum" of interspersed non-local entities.
But I'm waaaay over my head here, so I'll stop waving my hands. :-)
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We do. If you bothered to read the article, it makes a point that the communication speed between the components would be slow enough (even at light speed signaling) that the age of the universe would not have permitted sufficient time for such an organism to evolve and do anything.
Well, maybe the age of universe is indeed "too short" for it to do anything useful yet? Your argument seems to be supporting the idea that the universe is like a baby who is still too young to do anything.
We still don't know if the Universe itself isn't a living organism with us playing the role of tiny viruses that require intelligence/consciousness to fulfill certain tasks, like what gut bacteria does for us.
I'm no expert on xenobiology, but it seems like in our search for life we're always looking for life like Earth's. Are we even looking for life at much different scales of size or time?
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All communication relies on quantum phenomenon. The universe is a big mess of quantum phenomenon. It's not magic that lets you violate the laws of physics, it is the laws of physics.
It's funny with all the downvotes, first I never said that anything violated the laws of physics, I said that they don't follow the physics as life on earth. Second, there are many downvotes, but no actual evidence of what I said being wrong. I feel as if I am arguing with self-reassured people.
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I'm no expert on xenobiology, but it seems like in our search for life we're always looking for life like Earth's. Are we even looking for life at much different scales of size or time?
> Are we even looking for life at much different scales of size or time? Yes, see: http://www.xenology.info/Xeno.htm
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The burden of proof lies on you, not 'them'. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
The same analogy can be applied in reverse. The article here is the one that is making an unfalsifiable claim that "a living creature cannot be as big as a galaxy", but offers no definitive proof of nonexistence of such creative.
The classic example of white swans and black swans adheres to the problem of making universal generalizations because we simply have not yet observed a black swan, and we cannot use the continued observation of white swans as empirical evidence. However, we are not attempting to make a universal generalization based on inductive reasoning.
We have, available to us, a schema for enforcing the testability of this claim, which the article and its references explore in detail. The square-cube law and our current model of physics both make it impossible for a "living creature" to be as large as a galaxy, for any definition of "living" and "creature" that is reasonably agreeable.
The normal processes of life; including temperature regulation, metabolism, energy expenditure and movement would all be severely impeded in a single discrete organism of that size. Moreover, it would have severely limited cognition even if signals traveled at the speed of light, which handicaps both its own sophistication and potential evolution.
It doesn't seem appropriate to characterize something that cannot have these functioning traits as "living"; the only way forward seems to be to broaden our definition of "living" or "creature" to some sort of aggregated, abstract consciousness that makes organisms like ourselves analogous to bacteria. But that can hardly be called a discrete organism in the same way that our brains are cognitively independent of the life around them.