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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?

#191

Post by Razengan »

delecti wrote: post #118
Consultant32452 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

If you fall into a coma or vegetative state, are you still you?

What about during anesthesia, or deep sleep? (disregarding the certainty that you will wake up)

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

#192

Post by delecti »

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…

The Ship of Theseus question is certainly relevant to a discussion of identity changing over time (our body's cells are constantly turning over), but I think it's completely unrelated to a discussion of the line between my gut bacteria and me.

Though to answer your question, "I" am an emergent phenomenon resulting from the interactions of the atoms in my body. "I" am just a wave passing through the universe, with my body as the medium of transmission. Similarly, "wind" is merely a description of what the air is doing where you are. As the wind blows, the specific air molecules you're observing as "the wind" are completely different from moment to moment, but a breeze persisting through an afternoon is all perceived as being the same wind.

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

#193

Post by agravier »

delecti wrote: post #192
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…

The Ship of Theseus question is certainly relevant to a discussion of identity changing over time (our body's cells are constantly turning over), but I think it's completely unrelated to a discussion of the line between my gut bacteria and me. Though to answer your question, "I" am an emergent phenomenon resulting from the interactions of the atoms in my body. "I" am just a wave passing through the universe, with my…

Your gut bacteria determine a lot of your behaviour.

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

#194

Post by delecti »

agravier wrote: post #193
delecti wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ship of Theseus question is certainly relevant to a discussion of identity changing over time (our body's cells are constantly turning over), but I think it's completely unrelated to a discussion of the line between my gut bacteria and me. Though to answer your question, "I" am an emergent phenomenon resulting from the interactions of the atoms in my body. "I" am just a wave passing through the universe, with my…

Your gut bacteria determine a lot of your behaviour.

And the most interesting animals determine the flow of traffic around the zoo. But the zoo is still not the elephants. My environment also influences my behavior, but I am not my environment.

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

#195

Post by LambdaComplex »

olegkikin wrote: post #132
Swizec wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Universe is our local observable space-time So if we observe something beyond what is currently observable, would that not become observable and thus part of the universe?

You're in a room. You give it label "room". Then you find a door, you go outside of the room, you don't call everything outside "room", you give new things new names. For now we're stuck in our universe, we know it's expanding (in something, potentially). So we preemptively give the name "cosmos" to EVERYTHING. It's entirely possible that cosmos is equal to universe. But it's also possible there are other universes o…

In your scenario, the door is a clear divider between "room" and "not room." What's the equivalent divider in the universe scenario?

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

#196

Post by dang »

banachtarski wrote: post #7
bitL wrote: post #2

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.

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.

> If you bothered to read the article

This particular nasty swipe is not only not ok on HN, there's a specific rule against it. Please (re)-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

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

#197

Post by komali2 »

ztjio wrote: post #92
komali2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well even worse, our thoughts are bound by some maximum distance of comprehension. We can abstract the stellar scale but we can't understand it like we understand the distance across the street or whatever. I find this frustrating :(

Well I think the implication that we can't understand/comprehend these things is itself frustrating and also wrong. Why does one assume that the scale of the universe and the scale of that street you refer to are any different? In both cases you are experiencing and considering an estimation of potentially infinite space at an almost metaphorical level as it relates to your experience, plans, and actions. Indeed, you…

I was thinking along the lines of evolutionary biology - I'm assuming my human brain is only capable of truly processing scales that realistically my ancestors would experience.

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

#198

Post by 22TrilAsecond »

Here are the ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.

Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, ‘lumbering robots’, in Richard Dawkins’s vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.

All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains.

The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).

The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same for ever.

Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.

All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not ‘out there’, where it seems to be, but inside your brain.

Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.

Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory.

Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

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

#199

Post by Taek »

simonh wrote: post #181
Taek wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we assume that the big bang was actually the conception event of some other cosmic entity, the universe could very easily be a living organism that's the equivalent of a few microsecond old fertilized zygote. So yes, a universe sized lifeform could not have evolved randomly since the big bang, but you can only be confident about that if you assume that nothing exists outside the spacetime bubble we call the univer…

Suppose an organism is born and lives for 100 years. The organism is 10 metres across. However the rate of propagation of chemicals, blood, nerve signals, etc across its body is only 1mm per year. So over the 100 years if someone touched one of its extremities, the signal for that event would only have propagated across 10% of the diameter of the organism in its lifetime. Does it really make sense to talk about it as…

What if it lived for 500,000 years? You can solve your problem by assuming the organism lives longer. Maybe the universe is an organism that lives 10^100 years. We have no idea. And, as pointed out other places in the thread, by the time we are pondering about organisms of that scale, the very laws of physics (speed of light, spacetime, etc.) may be different.

Ae could be in it's stomach, where processes slow down the speed of light by a factor of trillions so that we are easier to digest.

None of these are testable hypothesese of course. But one day they may be testable.

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

#200

Post by collinmanderson »

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…

> a copy of him gets assembled on some planet (using local materials I believe

Doesn't the Star Trek transporter use the _same_ atoms/materials without making a copy?

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