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What Is Life? (2019)

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Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#101

Post by PoachedSausage »

patcon wrote: post #57
PoachedSausage wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we have fully grasped what information really is yet, almost like fish that have just become aware of the ocean. After finishing James Gleick's excellent The Information (mentioned recently on HN), I came away wanting more. There doesn't seem to be more because humans haven't figured it out yet.

Santa Fe Institute! Highly recommend the Complexity podcast. So much good stuff that all dovetails with Gleick's stuff My recent favourite contained an analogy by researcher Sara Imari Walker, who had this great line about how "If you want to understand gravity, you look to black holes, since they're the densest known objects where gravity acts insanely strongly compared to all other forces. In the same way, if you w…

Thanks. I'll have to check that out.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#102

Post by PoachedSausage »

sebmellen wrote: post #92
f430 wrote: post #89

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 probabl…

Terence McKenna really was a magician, in the sense that he could speak magic words and manifest his ideas in your head very clearly. The concept you reference is what he called "The Transcendental Object at the End of Time". See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XMz4hWR5i0

The guy was really a master story teller, whether you take what he was saying seriously is up to you. Saying that, he did a lecture in New York when Giuliani was mayor and makes a quip about "the consciousness of Giuliani administration". I could not help being reminded of it when Giuliani resurfaced recently.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#103

Post by nine_k »

juvenalmuniz wrote: post #94

"Life is a chemical system that uses energy to keep itself from reaching chemical equilibrium." I like the above "definition" from this YT video (This Ciliate is About to Die): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibpdNqrtar0

I think it misses the point that's key for my view of life: expanding to reagents around it, so it does not stay isolated in one Goldilocks location.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#104

Post by asdf3331 »

proc0 wrote: post #97

Life can be defined in terms of entropy. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says it's always increasing, and it was once lower. The law only applies for closed systems, so if we generalize to any system sometimes entropy increases. Life is a system that consumes low entropy and transforms into high entropy [negative entropy]. From light to other life, life is consuming lower forms of entropy to then use it in its informat…

Schrodinger wrote about life from this perspective in an article also called "What is life?"

I thought it was pretty good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#105

Post by proc0 »

asdf3331 wrote: post #104
proc0 wrote: post #97

Life can be defined in terms of entropy. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says it's always increasing, and it was once lower. The law only applies for closed systems, so if we generalize to any system sometimes entropy increases. Life is a system that consumes low entropy and transforms into high entropy [negative entropy]. From light to other life, life is consuming lower forms of entropy to then use it in its informat…

Schrodinger wrote about life from this perspective in an article also called "What is life?" I thought it was pretty good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F

Yes exactly. It's a great read. Here is the snippet about my other comment (p.25)

> Every process, event, happening -call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy -or, as you may say, produces positive entropy -and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is of death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy -which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#108

Post by patcon »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #79
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.

I think we've lost something here. Shared delusions are delusions, but the important part was that they're shared. Unfortunately, science doesn't have the "shared" part - by itself, it doesn't build communities. In my experience, if you ignore the particulars of faith, most religions are essentially community construction kits. We'll probably figure this out at some point - we need to, if we are to survive. Right now…

> most religions are essentially community construction kits

love this.

What you wrote really resonates with me. Particularly the thinking on geographically-defined communities being important. I feel the full significance of this swap/migration (geographic => web) is not appreciated by most people (neither the builders of modern social networks, nor the participants), and we continue to bricolage our established geographic social networks with internet-based ones at our own peril.

I hate to sound melodramatic, but... increased tendency toward civil strife and failing democracies seems pretty dramatic to me

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#109

Post by patcon »

raiflip wrote: post #68
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…

Old Testament version of Christianity? You mean Judaism?

heh, oops. yep :)

Re: What Is Life? (2019)

#110

Post by patcon »

pavas wrote: post #78
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…

You're describing memes.

The distinctions (between all the ways "meme" is used) are addressed pretty well in van Driem's papers and book chapters. In short, Dawkinsian "memes" are a very weakened version, mostly based on rote mimicking and copying. His meme was actually more strongly defined in the prior literature that he borrowed the term from and diluted.

The Leiden hypothesis leans on a harder version, in which memes are quite literally a new strata of life and our minds are co-evolved host organisms that straddle two layers -- a cyborg of biological and semiotic organisms. Our minds might be better conceived as akin to the fertile replication machinery of the biological systems below (ie. DNA polymerase) -- Where the linear packets of information are remixed and recombined after being delivered from the internal and external environment. And if there's some truth there, then it prompts lots of questions (e.g., about what is the most appropriate unit of life at the cultural/linguistic level. Because DNA polymerase is not what we normally consider "alive" -- we consider the aggregate cell alive. etc. etc)

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