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The Grayness of the Origin of Life

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Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#51

Post by TaupeRanger »

djokkataja wrote: post #26
TaupeRanger wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's simpler than you're allowing. Death in animals is the absence of consciousness with no possibility of recovery. In plants and maybe-but-probably-not-sentient life, it's more complicated.

The "possibility of recovery", as you put it, is a moving target depending on the specific situation and the technology involved. For some examples: https://www.wired.com/2014/07/revive-the-dead/ The point being that as technology continues to develop in this area, our understanding of when someone is "dead" may also continue to shift. There's also the classic example of comatose people.

Decay still gives you a hard deadline, unless you freeze the body a la cryogenics. But that's a long shot.

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#52

Post by hoten »

perl4ever wrote: post #50
benlivengood wrote: post #40

I find it fascinating that abiotic chemical/physical cycles are considered an integral part of early life (e.g. if your nutrient transport is environmental osmosis/tides/whatever, you're still alive but the larger environment is an integral part of your biochemistry). From that perspective the freshwater cycle is still a major component of biochemistry (bulk ion transport) on Earth, despite arguably being a physical…

>The Sun provides photons that most cells need in order to live but Desulforudis audaxviator have decoupled themselves from that source of energy. In theory they could outlast the solar system or hitch a ride on a rogue planet. I suspect it's the opposite; first there was life and then it evolved to use sunlight. How did life arise on earth right after the rocks stopped being red hot? The only reasonable theory in my…

> And of course panspermia isn't new or my idea particularly, but what bugs me is instead of saying there needs to be more evidence, it should be the default assumption. Our environment is just not representative of most of the universe even if you ignore non-baryonic dark matter.

One might dismiss this by invoking the anthropic principle (a blunt argument, sorry). Most of the universe is void, and planets with no sun have little energy being tossed into their closed system. It seems adding whatever the hell can be found on asteroids into a planet bombarded by energy (a star being most convenient) is a necessary catalyst for life.

I'm sure I haven't thought about this as much as you have. What makes you think life can be formed without the presence of a star? Is it simply how much more not-near-a-star places there are?

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#53

Post by cdogl »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #31
bmitc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a consequence of your thinking? I don’t think it’s arbitrary. There’s a clear distinction between say a rock and a cell, even if you view the rock on geological timescales and the cell on biological timescales. I don’t think it’s arbitrary or even surprising that humans view things from our own vantage point in reality.

There's a negative consequence - If the line between life and non-life is blurry, that means there isn't a clear place for souls to fit in. If life can be completely explained as an emergent property of individual non-living parts, (ultimately, atoms aren't alive, even though they make up living things) then we can't tell whether souls exist in our universe or not. This isn't a big deal for science, but it's a moral…

The concept of a soul is a rich one, and for many people is largely metaphorical or figurative. You can subscribe to a materialist account of our cosmos and still draw meaning from the idea of a soul.

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#54

Post by mongol »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #31
bmitc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a consequence of your thinking? I don’t think it’s arbitrary. There’s a clear distinction between say a rock and a cell, even if you view the rock on geological timescales and the cell on biological timescales. I don’t think it’s arbitrary or even surprising that humans view things from our own vantage point in reality.

There's a negative consequence - If the line between life and non-life is blurry, that means there isn't a clear place for souls to fit in. If life can be completely explained as an emergent property of individual non-living parts, (ultimately, atoms aren't alive, even though they make up living things) then we can't tell whether souls exist in our universe or not. This isn't a big deal for science, but it's a moral…

Moral victory for atheists sounds like an oxymoron. Atheists don't need victories - there is nothing to prove - and atheism is amoral.

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#55

Post by mongol »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #10
blurbleblurble wrote: post #5

I'm personally convinced at this point that most everyday distinctions between living and dead are arbitrary human categorizations. Even a "dead body" is teaming with life. As far as "inanimate matter" is concerned, all matter is ultimately part of a plethora of various different cycles and processes of transformation and recapitulation... even if something temporarily looks like it's static to us and our meager litt…

I think it's simpler than you're allowing. Death in animals is the absence of consciousness with no possibility of recovery. In plants and maybe-but-probably-not-sentient life, it's more complicated.

I don't think we should mix in consciousness in the definition of life. It is hard enough as it is also without consciousness mixed in.

Origin of life and origin of consciousness are as I see it the two major mysteries of the universe. I see them as separate.

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#56

Post by mongol »

BurningFrog wrote: post #49
hahajk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And some might say “but the hive itself doesn’t have consciousness, or an ‘experience’”. Which is impossible for you to know, unless you are (or have been) a hive.

If you attack the hive, it definitely defends itself. It looks for food, etc... It is popular to admire the selfless ants or bees who willingly give their lives for their society. But if you think of them as cells of an organism, that happens in every living being. When you see a hive sacrificing itself, we can talk :)

This is an example of the greyness that the article discusses. If hives are to be seen as distinct life, it will be quite close to the end of a spectrum.

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#57

Post by tagami »

BurningFrog wrote: post #30
gus_massa wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all agree when we should say that a cow is dead, but what about sponges? You can pass a sponge through a sieve, and the isolated cells will recombine https://www.shapeoflife.org/video/sponges-time-lapse-sponge-... (Is there a better link?) Can a single cell of a sponge create a "new" sponge? Or it's just the "old" sponge? Should you wait until the last cell is dead until we can claim it's dead? Back to cows... You…

You can think of insect hives (bees, ants, etc) as a single organism that happens to not be physically contiguous. The individual insects in a hive are typically 75% identical genetically.

How similar are city and hive?

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#58

Post by cout »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #27
gus_massa wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all agree when we should say that a cow is dead, but what about sponges? You can pass a sponge through a sieve, and the isolated cells will recombine https://www.shapeoflife.org/video/sponges-time-lapse-sponge-... (Is there a better link?) Can a single cell of a sponge create a "new" sponge? Or it's just the "old" sponge? Should you wait until the last cell is dead until we can claim it's dead? Back to cows... You…

It's not a matter of arbitrary classification in the cow case. The original definition still works. The heart has no experience. The continuum of consciousness exists solely within the heartless cow. Whether you want to call the heart "alive" is the same as the question about plants and sponges.

Do we know that the heart has no experience?

What level of complexity is required for experience?

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#59

Post by andi999 »

mongol wrote: post #56
BurningFrog wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you attack the hive, it definitely defends itself. It looks for food, etc... It is popular to admire the selfless ants or bees who willingly give their lives for their society. But if you think of them as cells of an organism, that happens in every living being. When you see a hive sacrificing itself, we can talk :)

This is an example of the greyness that the article discusses. If hives are to be seen as distinct life, it will be quite close to the end of a spectrum.

The end of the spectrum is probably more at thinking of human cities as distinct life forms.

Re: The Grayness of the Origin of Life

#60

Post by morpheos137 »

cout wrote: post #58
TaupeRanger wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a matter of arbitrary classification in the cow case. The original definition still works. The heart has no experience. The continuum of consciousness exists solely within the heartless cow. Whether you want to call the heart "alive" is the same as the question about plants and sponges.

Do we know that the heart has no experience? What level of complexity is required for experience?

Experience is not a function of a simple "level of complexity" but of structure with specific function. The idea that you reach a certain level of complexity and just get sentience as an incidental side effect of the complexity is a fallacy for multiple reasons. Sentience results from structures specifically crafted to create sentience. In the 21st century as opposed to the 12th century we know for sure that the structures that give us sentience reside entirely in the brain. We can examine the highly complex structure of the heart and compare it to the brain and see that while the heart is complex it does not have the same structure as the brain. The heart is not sentient not because it lacks sufficient "level of complexity" but rather because it lacks a specific functional form of complexity, i.e. the heart lacks information processing structures that the brain has. We can also observe things like when there is a heart transplant the recpient does not start experiencing a change in personality from an independent "sentient" donor heart. Thus there is no evidence that sentience resides outside the brain, so why assume it might?

You could just as well assume that a rock has the processing power of a computer CPU but it just lacks input and output.

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