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Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

nautil.us

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Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#171

Post by wellboy »

fattire wrote: post #121
delecti wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A zoo is still a zoo if there aren't any animals in it, but it wouldn't stay in business very long. No matter how important the animals are to the long-term viability of the zoo, they are not the zoo. My gut bacteria may be vital to my survival, but they are not me. I don't find placing that line to be difficult at all.

> A zoo is still a zoo if there aren't any animals in it Is it? Identity is an interesting thing. To use a commonly-cited example-- if I swap out the muffler of my car and toss the original in the backyard, I think most would say I am still driving the same car. If I do the same with the front left tire, it's still essentially my car. Even if replace all four tires, same. But what if I swap one part a day with a repl…

You are also not the same person as 1 millisecond ago, since numerous neuronal connections changed.

So it definitely comes down to the definition. You would also be you if your brain were just in a glass with wires and you could process input and give output through a computer maybe without all the gut bacteria.

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#172

Post by wellboy »

paradite wrote: post #14
banachtarski wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Though most stars will have burnt out in a couple of billion years and heat death will come, where no cellular life can exist, so not sure if this is more useduo than now.

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#173

Post by chongli »

knome wrote: post #162
chongli wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if somebody has a limb amputation, losing a lot of nerves, are they a different person? Is somebody a different person when they're drunk? I've heard both of these thrown around colloquially. It's not obvious or straightforward to answer. You could imagine a Ship of Theseus style replacement of all the neurons in your head with artificial ones. At what point would you stop being you?

Never. "I" am a pattern of self awareness. The constituent parts are irrelevant. So long as the parts support the self awareness, "I" am.

So you would have no qualms about stepping into a Star Trek-style transporter, having your pattern scanned, your matter destroyed and recreated at the destination? If so, I would ask: what if the destroy step malfunctioned? There would be two of you. Which one would you be?

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#174

Post by diminish »

chii wrote: post #144
aato wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of stuff is fun to think about. In my opinion identity is based on behaviour, not composition. So long as an entity matches a given behaviour profile, then for all intents and purposes that entity IS the thing that the behaviour is normally attributed to. Kind of like Duck Typing: "If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck." So my response to your car example is that both veh…

So if an alien abducted you, created a clone to replace you while you are experimented upon, you'd still agree that you are living normally, and nothing happened to "you"?

Few years ago, I was in a PR show for a shopping center where Paris Hilton showed up. Everyone was interested to see her. It turns out she was not the true Paris Hilton but a doppelganger.

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#177

Post by edem »

fattire wrote: post #121
delecti wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A zoo is still a zoo if there aren't any animals in it, but it wouldn't stay in business very long. No matter how important the animals are to the long-term viability of the zoo, they are not the zoo. My gut bacteria may be vital to my survival, but they are not me. I don't find placing that line to be difficult at all.

> A zoo is still a zoo if there aren't any animals in it Is it? Identity is an interesting thing. To use a commonly-cited example-- if I swap out the muffler of my car and toss the original in the backyard, I think most would say I am still driving the same car. If I do the same with the front left tire, it's still essentially my car. Even if replace all four tires, same. But what if I swap one part a day with a repl…

I think the key part is conrinuity here. What happens if you step into a device which disassembles you atom by atom then reassembles you (assuming that this is possible)? Relevant article: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#178

Post by moomin »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #117
stareatgoats wrote: post #88

The question is not correctly formed: what we really want to know is if there are life-like beings that could operate on a totally different scale than ours (both time and size wise, including viruses and whales here). Self centered thinking, i.e. restricting our inquiry to only include protein-based lifeforms or other qualities required on our scale obviously prevents us from having the required open minded mindset.

There are more bacterial cells in your body than there are human cells. Where exactly do you draw the line between what constitutes "you."

I think it's instructive to consider an article written by a bacterium about the possibility of living creatures at the metre length scale.

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#179

Post by olegkikin »

andars wrote: post #137
olegkikin wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's you who gets incorrect information from some random blogs. The size of the observable universe: ~93 billion light-years Time since the big bang: ~13.7 billion years. http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/104-the-universe/c... https://phys.org/news/2015-02-fast-universe.html

The author of that random blog is Sean Carroll, professor of physics at Caltech specializing in cosmology and GR. That doesn't mean he must be right, but I feel pretty comfortable citing him.

Well, I hope you're comfortable with dividing 93 by 13.7.

Re: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

#180

Post by jacquesm »

celticninja wrote: post #169
fattire wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A zoo is still a zoo if there aren't any animals in it Is it? Identity is an interesting thing. To use a commonly-cited example-- if I swap out the muffler of my car and toss the original in the backyard, I think most would say I am still driving the same car. If I do the same with the front left tire, it's still essentially my car. Even if replace all four tires, same. But what if I swap one part a day with a repl…

A zoo without animals is just a collection of buildings, sure it could be a zoo again but it could also be anything else. A bit like a Lego house, you can break it up and you have all the parts to make a house, so it is potentially a house but it could also be anything else.

http://imgur.com/a/UBDSO

Indeed it could ;)

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