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What Is Life? (2019)

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Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#111

Post by patcon »

plutonorm wrote: post #81
patcon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Heh thanks :) I'd venture it's more about "life-emerging" forces happening at all scales -- That all matter is slowly tending toward living when it sits in the blaze of an entropy-generating monster like a star.

Disclaimer: Did an honours degree in biochemistry, so perhaps I'm not so great at filling in the narrative space of my own mental leaps :)

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#112

Post by namero999 »

cortic wrote: post #90
namero999 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, but again the analogy does not hold water, there is big difference between a sentient agent programming a laptop (for which we have a complete causal/mechanistic account) and evolution, which is not sentient/self-aware and can only be said to be "following a direction". The only way I could steelman this argument is by assuming a telos in nature, in which case it would quickly become a religious argument. If life was just an algorithm to consume energy we would already be past the point of creating artificial life, while instead we have no clue of how it begins, with our best conjecture being abiogenesis which we have so far failed spectacularly to recreate in a lab. I am convinced that it is only matter of time before we have artificial life, but it will come in the form and shape of the regular metabolizing biological life.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#113

Post by namero999 »

plutonorm wrote: post #80
namero999 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Panpsychism is definitely not dumb, but it's untenable and has unresolvable internal inconsistencies. If you want panpsychism without the contradictions, you'll have to look at analytical idealism.

I love this. A lot. Thanks for sharing.

Happy if that clicked. It has been quite an eye opener for me.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#114

Post by Enginerrrd »

resu_nimda wrote: post #50
Enginerrrd wrote: post #18

My own personal definition of life is the following, somewhat hand-wavy, theoretically weak, though pragmatically strong definition: Life is anything capable of sloppy self-replication in a sufficiently complex environment. Viruses are definitely alive. Something like Tierra [1], Avida[2], or modern variants[3] of mutating copying programs come close, giving rise to whole ecosystems of parasites and hosts and defense…

I’ve been intrigued by Artificial Life for a while; I feel like it’s the way forward for GAI. I think the ML approach leaves out a lot of what is required to develop interesting intelligence. The main challenges I see are: 1) With any given simulation, it’s going to take a long time before something really noteworthy emerges, and until then how do you know you’re on the right track? 2) What is the fitness function? T…

I've given a lot of thought to this over the years too and come to a very similar conclusion. GAI really probably needs to create itself.

I think that intuition was at least partially confirmed by the successes of GAN's. ...not every problem can be solved that way, per se but it's a good starting place.

The big challenge here though IMO is computational! If you're going to use genetic algorithms to create organisms, you have to then let each of those organisms train themselves. It sounds computationally expensive. And the search space is absolutely massive! It will take some really intelligent effort to bring it down to a level that's feasible.

On that note though, the other thing is that I'm convinced that you also need to include for GAI is fundamental structural arrangements as evolvable parameters. You can argue that this is unnecessary mathematically, but IMO, a little bit of intelligent structure can make the same number of neurons a lot more efficient to train. We see this confirmed in some of the more successful deep learning pipelines. Different components of the whole system get specialized training which gives structure to the whole system.

From an artificial life standpoint, I thought about just offering resources based on correct answers to questions, with exponentially greater resources awarded to harder questions. Questions though would need to be generated in situ of course to avoid memorization.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#115

Post by kneel »

rmah wrote: post #63
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.

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"?

Almost, Star Wars and LOTR are not really self propelling ideas that guide populations of people. The information is there, it's just not nearly as memetic.

Although I would say that Star Wars has inspired a lot of space exploration, it's not nearly as viral as something like Christianity.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#116

Post by kneel »

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…

>I'd just never run across that idea before that book, but is there a specific place you came across it? :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa

This is dancing on the edge of reality and metaphysics, I think the subject is fascinating since so much of our world is dominated by narratives.. real or imagined.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#117

Post by Daniel_sk »

kneel wrote: post #115
rmah wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Almost, Star Wars and LOTR are not really self propelling ideas that guide populations of people. The information is there, it's just not nearly as memetic. Although I would say that Star Wars has inspired a lot of space exploration, it's not nearly as viral as something like Christianity.

Also religion is going through evolution, Christianity or Islam is just the result of many trial-error previous long forgotten religions which were less fit and were replaced by religions that spread faster. For example, it seems like mono-theistic religions were simpler and easier to understand - this is one shared trait between the most of the current "live" religions.
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