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What Is Life? (2019)

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Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#61

Post by jahbrewski »

patcon wrote: post #53
jahbrewski wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think religion is actually an evolved mechanism for perpetuating (human) life. I developed this theory when my wife and I visited some friends in rural Kansas. We attended their Christian church service and I was struck by the potential evolutionary advantages that would play out if the preacher’s advice was taken at face value: 1) Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric: if only a fraction of LGBTQ individuals were shamed into a hete…

re: religion being evolutionarily advantageous. Totally. Though with your specific 3 points, I respectfully suggest you're missing the forest for the trees. The specific stories we tell through religion don't always matter as much as the aggregate power of enacting and conjuring them together. Sometimes strong-willed and stubborn groups are what was needed to thread a needle through an important time in history. Many…

Ah, I like where you're coming from. Thanks for the link; I'm definitely interested in exploring these topics further. Is there a name for this field of study? Perhaps just the sociology of religion? That seems to leave out the evolutionary biology perspective though.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#62

Post by jahbrewski »

patcon wrote: post #60
monkeynotes wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is why technology and science is the new religion we all live by. Technology has the potential to perpetuate information indefinitely. Organic life bootstrapped the path to inorganic life and beyond. Religion served its purpose and no longer feels relevant in light of technology and science.

> Religion served its purpose and no longer feels relevant in light of technology and science. Ah interesting. I personally wonder whether our challenges with conspiracies are related to the hole we're left with as religious belief starts to deteriorate. So I'm wondering if spirituality is still needed, if only as a rubber plug until we learn again how to use shared stories to more intentionally chart collective dire…

Additionally, at a more fundamental/basic level, I wonder about the social gap we're left with, sans religion. I'm probably biased by my Christian upbringing, but I can't help but miss the camaraderie I experienced growing up in a church. My wife and I just can't bring ourselves to knowingly participate in something that now feels intellectually dishonest.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#63

Post by rmah »

kneel wrote: post #52
jhedwards wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In George C Williams' book Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges , he starts the book with some philosophical problems for biologists. One of my favorites is that he points out a sharp distinction between the "codical" domain and the domain of "interactors". Interactors are the physical organisms that interact with each other and the environment. The codices are the information stored in the genes. He ma…

This is how Jesus/Buddha/Mohammed are real, not because all the stories about them are true or that they are actually divine. But because they are actual self propagating ideas promoted by real physical people.

Aren't you just redefining the word "real" there to mean "the idea exists" instead of "a physical person existed"?

But by that definition, Han Solo and Bilbo Baggins are also "real". At what point do we simply use a different word for "physically exists"?

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#64

Post by frimsah »

patcon wrote: post #58
kneel wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how Jesus/Buddha/Mohammed are real, not because all the stories about them are true or that they are actually divine. But because they are actual self propagating ideas promoted by real physical people.

Neat! I haven't seen this idea out in the world much, but a book called "Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything" kinda runs at this from a neat science-rooted philosophy perspective. It basically says that any philosophical framework needs to have just as much to say about fictional beings as it does physical, since fictional constructs certainly affect us. I'd just never run across that idea before tha…

Interesting. In some circles of psychology and mythology, such as in reading Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, there is an importance given to fiction because stories will affect people's lives in a profound way. The way I understand this view is that any information - whether objectively observed, or subjectively interpreted - which is meaningful deserves to be honored and understood.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#65

Post by patcon »

jahbrewski wrote: post #61
patcon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re: religion being evolutionarily advantageous. Totally. Though with your specific 3 points, I respectfully suggest you're missing the forest for the trees. The specific stories we tell through religion don't always matter as much as the aggregate power of enacting and conjuring them together. Sometimes strong-willed and stubborn groups are what was needed to thread a needle through an important time in history. Many…

Ah, I like where you're coming from. Thanks for the link; I'm definitely interested in exploring these topics further. Is there a name for this field of study? Perhaps just the sociology of religion? That seems to leave out the evolutionary biology perspective though.

No prob! "complexity science + " is usually a great starter for finding stuff from this angle. Complexity podcast by SFI is a wealth of knowledge, and had a recent episode about archeologists applying complexity thinking to history:

Scott Ortman on Archaeological Synthesis and Settlement Scaling Theory https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/47

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#66

Post by frongpik »

bonoboTP wrote: post #28

Before all the details we need to arrive at the right ballpark and establish the basics. I know on my example that even though I got through school with good grades, I was still full of misconceptions due to a few key errors fed from teachers, bullshit pseudo knowledge I picked up from ufo+mystery magazines and TV edutainment. So first, there is nothing special about life. Life doesn't break the normal laws of physic…

"Life doesn't violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics" sounds similar to "magnetism does no work". Yet we know that magnetism creates macroscopic effects: a magnet can lift an iron nail, despite it does no work. The way it's explained is that magnetism somehow redirects other forces that do the work. My point is that something can do work without doing work "on paper" because all the work is done by others.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#67

Post by frongpik »

verma7 wrote: post #49

The analogy of the question "What is life?" with "What is a computer?" bring up interesting parallels. The author defines a computer as any device that has transistors, RAM, etc that is, the computing substrate. But there were devices that didn't use transistors, but used vacuum tubes or mechanical gears (like Babbage's Analytical engine), which I think are still computers. We have some good theoretical model of comp…

The analogy goes deeper. Most of us are familiar with the spirit-soul-body concept. Descriptions of the three are very similar to concepts in CS: spirit is the algorithm or an idea - in this sense the spirit is immutable and the same for all devices, soul is the software - it's mutable, implemented in a particular language or framework and generally strives to be a perfect reflection of the spirit, and finally the cpu itself with all the machinery running electrons is the body - it's run by that almost immaterial soul, although no part of that machinery, not even a single electron, is a part of the soul. The connection between the three can be easily understood by CS folks, but is a great mystery for uninitiated (i.e. those who can't code).

There's even a striking analogy of good an evil. "The evil is affirmation of disorder" (Eliphas Levi) and that is bugs and poor chaotic design: software that embraces this disorder, gives up liberty and reason (aka the good) and becomes evil, for evil has neither liberty nor reason.

I'm sure The Matrix used this very analogy.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#68

Post by raiflip »

patcon wrote: post #53
jahbrewski wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think religion is actually an evolved mechanism for perpetuating (human) life. I developed this theory when my wife and I visited some friends in rural Kansas. We attended their Christian church service and I was struck by the potential evolutionary advantages that would play out if the preacher’s advice was taken at face value: 1) Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric: if only a fraction of LGBTQ individuals were shamed into a hete…

re: religion being evolutionarily advantageous. Totally. Though with your specific 3 points, I respectfully suggest you're missing the forest for the trees. The specific stories we tell through religion don't always matter as much as the aggregate power of enacting and conjuring them together. Sometimes strong-willed and stubborn groups are what was needed to thread a needle through an important time in history. Many…

Old Testament version of Christianity? You mean Judaism?

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#69

Post by ausbah »

Daniel_sk wrote: post #15

In the book Sapiens there was an interesting thought that life is basically information that is trying to "survive". In the same way you can look at religion as some sort of information that spreads in people minds and without people it would ceise to exist or have even reasons to exist - the same way like a virus is just information that goes from host to host. Viruses can represent the simplest form of what life is…

but life and religion change overtime, so there isn't any single instance of "life" or "religion" you can point that is trying to survive - other than the whole concept of "life" and "religion" which feels like a non-answer

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#70

Post by bonoboTP »

frongpik wrote: post #66
bonoboTP wrote: post #28

Before all the details we need to arrive at the right ballpark and establish the basics. I know on my example that even though I got through school with good grades, I was still full of misconceptions due to a few key errors fed from teachers, bullshit pseudo knowledge I picked up from ufo+mystery magazines and TV edutainment. So first, there is nothing special about life. Life doesn't break the normal laws of physic…

"Life doesn't violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics" sounds similar to "magnetism does no work". Yet we know that magnetism creates macroscopic effects: a magnet can lift an iron nail, despite it does no work. The way it's explained is that magnetism somehow redirects other forces that do the work. My point is that something can do work without doing work "on paper" because all the work is done by others.

Where did you hear that magnetism does no work?

I remember learning in school that the magnetic field does work on objects and the magnetic potential energy is converted into kinetic energy in the process.

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