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What Is Life? (2019)

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Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#81

Post by plutonorm »

patcon wrote: post #59
plutonorm wrote: post #4

A virus is a meta lifeform. It is life that operates given the existence of metabolising organisms. Life operates directly over the physical matter in the universe, a virus just operates a step above this.

Really like this "meta lifeform" idea. I'd suggest it might go further, even into the realm of language, story, and culture. Might there be a case for claiming language itself is another level of meta lifeform that has grown and evolved within the habitable neural landscape of our mind. Perhaps this is what separates us from animals. So obscure theories from computational linguists get pretty deep in this stuff. I ha…

Yes. Let's try to blow your mind. Is it organisms all the way down? Where do atoms come from? Literally I don't know, just a shower thought for you.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#82

Post by frongpik »

jbay808 wrote: post #75
bonoboTP wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There seems to be a bit of a rabbit hole here. It starts with the magnetic field interacting with charged particles only at right angles to their motion, meaning that it cannot do work on them. Work is done by electric fields that are induced by time-varying magnetic fields. Then there are objections that they can do work on magnetic dipoles (eg two permanent magnets rotating into alignment). This is countered with a…

This deserves its own post on HN. Do you know what's the going theory about how magnetism induces the current loop? Something must tell electrons that it's time to move in the clockwise direction and that something moves at the speed of light.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#83

Post by TeMPOraL »

kaycebasques wrote: post #73
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…

See also The Meme Machine, which is a book from the 90s (I think) that attempts to take Dawkins' idea of memes to its logical conclusion (and the book has Dawkins' blessing as evidenced by the fact he provides a foreword or at least a quote of praise/approval). I believe the author argues that memes are essentially a new form of life. Genes are the biological form of life that we're most aware of. Memes are basically…

I think you've made a good summary. And it leads to some interesting perspectives.

SSC classic, The Toxoplasma of Rage[0], explores this a bit. One fragment that burned into my mind is the few paragraphs reinterpreting the War on Terror as a parasite with multi-stage life cycle (like toxoplasma). To quote a part:

> From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.

--

[0] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#84

Post by TeMPOraL »

ausbah wrote: post #69
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

That's a problem with our categories, though. We assign static labels to pieces of a dynamic system.

All what we consider life is essentially one big ongoing chemical reaction. We are just repetitive patterns in it, and we see repetitive patterns in it, and we label these patterns. But these patterns are changing in a way imperceptible to us, until at some point we realize the thing we're looking at is different than what it was in the past.

Religion could be viewed in the same way. We see stable, slowly changing patterns in the information flow. Patterns that tend to turn noise into more copies of themselves.

It's also important to remember that when we say that some life form or piece of information is "trying to survive", we're anthropomorphizing it. The pattern doesn't have a will and isn't trying anything. The interactions between the pattern and the noise, or other patterns, tend to yield something similar to the original pattern in question.

(That's all a sophisticated way of saying that life is like Game of Life, where we identify interesting structures and give them a name - but in code, those structures don't exist in the first place. It's just a grid and a set of rules.)

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#85

Post by mrlala »

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…

I think that's an insightful way to put things. While getting a chance to do some science with my kids during this crazy time, I was forced to put things into words and (relatively) simple terms for things that I always felt I was lacking knowledge, because of a similar type of teaching as you described. But as I began teaching some simple concepts, I for some reason had a better understand than I ever have, and was able to put them into very simple terms.

I feel like so many teachers are on autopilot with various topics that they don't know how to explain the most simple part of a concept, and instead make it infinitely more complicated and it seems magical.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#87

Post by TeMPOraL »

douglaswlance wrote: post #23

Life is a _single_ self-propagating chemical reaction.

Exactly. From cause-and-effect point of view, it's a single chemical reactions. When we categorize living things, we're just putting labels on recurring fractal patterns we observe in that reaction.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#88

Post by frongpik »

bonoboTP wrote: post #70
frongpik wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It's a quote from wikipedia: an electron, moving in a magnetic field, experiences a force perpendicular to its trajectory, so the work - the dot product of the force and trajectory vectors - is zero.

I should probably add one unscientific remark (orthodox HN readers: proceed with caution). Per [...], the secret of organic lifeforms and the secret of intelligence are very different things. Organic lifeforms keep their shit together by balancing two kinds of magnetisms - od and ob - to direct the electricity - aour. Od is constructive, ob is destructive and aour performs all the action. That's somewhat similar to scientific notation: the H and B magnetic fields and the E electric field.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#89

Post by f430 »

The purpose of life is for the consciousness to realize that it is part of the whole. There is some form of an attractor force, outside of our immediate 3d world, that is attracting all self-aware sentient entities to become.

Applying western science and demanding evidence when it cannot be comprehended by the human mind is like the petulant child who asks why at the end of every sentence.

Terrence Mckenna is probably the only Westerner who has been able to articulate what the rest of the ancient civilizations have figured out independently.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#90

Post by cortic »

namero999 wrote: post #51
cortic wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An unplugged computer won't start to autonomously break down and convert chemicals into electricity to keep itself running.. You just described a laptop.

You know what I meant, but in case it's needed, that's why I qualified my sentence with "autonomously". And no, a set of software/actuators to regularly plug the laptop into mains is not the same kind of autonomy, since it would just be the execution of an algorithm that a sentient being programmed. Without that, the laptop won't be subject to any necessity or pressure to harvest energy.

>..since it would just be the execution of an algorithm that a sentient being programmed

And the execution of an algorithm that evolution programed is somehow 'special', probably because another algorithm says so.

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