Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 404 posts

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#101

Post by AnimalMuppet »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #2

Seems like a common theme these days, to find some theory of math/physics to explain life/evolution/consciousness E/Acc -> Second law of thermodynamics leads to 'life' as way of increasing entropy. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o... Constructor Theory -> A constructor is an entity that can cause the task to occur while retaining the ability to cause it again. - and Life is constructors. A…

It's almost teleological. Many people have ruled out God, but still want there to be purpose or direction.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#102

Post by jyounker »

I went I read the first few paragraphs I thought, "Is someone ripping off Stuart Kaufmann? He was writing about this idea thirty years ago." Then I read the first author: Stuart Kaufmann.

For those of you following along at home, Kaufmann has been developing the ideas here for decades. The paper is less a "here is a new idea" and much more "here is a concise summary of 50 years of work". The words and thoughts seem opaque, but this is case where they actually have concrete and specific meanings. It's worth noting too, that towards the end of the article he outlines experiments that could be used to falsify the theory.

If you want a really hard-core dive into the ideas, then check out his 1993 book, "On The Origins of Order" (ISBN 978-0-19-507951-7).

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-order...

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#103

Post by Balgair »

delichon wrote: post #67
hamburga wrote: post #27

I sat in on one of Stephen Wolfram’s YouTube lectures on his new physics project, and asked him about his conception of life in the big picture of physics. His perspective was that (if I may take the liberty of paraphrasing him) there’s nothing particularly special about life from the perspective of physics. What we call life simply correlates to parts of the physical world that have the highest degree of complexity…

Ok. What's an example of something low but non-zero on the spectrum of life? I'm having trouble thinking of one that isn't more properly "life-like".

Viruses?

New understandings of mega-viruses have let us to believe that the line is really quite fuzzy. Some of these larger viruses have double stranded DNA, some have ribosome like functions, some have ERs, etc. Kinda like a cell, but missing random parts that make them truly alive.

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

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#104

Post by cmrdporcupine »

lachlan_gray wrote: post #79

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying. Simple organisms make a bedrock for complex organisms, and while the complex organisms have more specific needs, they are better at exploring,…

> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up.

Sounds like observer bias.

In terms of number of individuals, the vast vast majority of life on this planet is single cell prokaryotes, and always has been. And in terms of total bio-mass only plants exceed them but that's just because of how plants work (cover the surface with bio-solar-panels)

Both bacteria and archaea haven't substantially changed in 3.5-4 billion years. They swap genes as needed, and drop them when they're too costly and unneeded. And they're dominant, and everywhere

They were here since just a few hundred million years (or less) after the earth formed. And when conditions on the planet become more hostile again, in the long run it could be the case that eukaryotes are just a historical blip (and a fluke, to boot).

And if there's something we recognize as life out there beyond earth... it's likely to look like prokaryotes. The galaxy might be swimming in that kind of thing.

There is a strong philosophical/ideological bias in our culture to see the world in terms of "progress"; a teleological bias, seeing the universe as proceeding in stages towards some order. It just so happens we almost always seem to define this progress as "inevitably" leading to ... us, or "beyond" us into whatever fantasy for the future is laying dormant in the present. It feels remarkably pre-Copernican.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#105

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

ta8645 wrote: post #5

Can't help but wonder, is AI an expected phase transition in the evolution of life in the universe? Is life really just the larval stage of a higher order intelligence?

I'd say so - it seems that life has to be created via evolution/competition, and left to run long enough evolution (survival/proliferation of the fittest) is likely produce organisms/entities that are not only better fit to the environment, but also better fit to the game. Evolution will tend to producing things that are better at evolving (faster to adapt). This includes things like multi-cellular life and sexual reproduction (creating variety via DNA mixing).

One type of evolutionary niche that seems almost inevitable to arise in any complex environment is intelligence - the generalist able to survive and thrive in a variety of circumstances, and in the competitive game of evolution greater intelligence should outcompete lesser intelligence. Eventually you'll get critters sufficiently intelligent to build AI of their own level or higher, which may be regarded as another way to win the game of evolution - an intelligence that can evolve much faster than the type that bootstrapped it.

It's interesting to consider does AI/AL (artificial life) really need to become autonomous and stand-alone, or can it be more like a virus that needs a host to survive. Stage one AI obviously needs a host, but maybe it never really needs to become stand-alone? It reminds me of (git author) Linus Torvalds' quote "real mean don't need backups" - you just release your software and have confidence it'll get replicated in git repositories worldwide. Maybe AI can be robust to extinction (not need a backup/body) just by becoming ubiquitous ?

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#106

Post by vlovich123 »

lachlan_gray wrote: post #79

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying. Simple organisms make a bedrock for complex organisms, and while the complex organisms have more specific needs, they are better at exploring,…

Another cool perspective is that simple organisms evolved to coordinate with each other to build complex organisms that could protect the simple organisms in hostile environments they might not / would take longer to explore. Think about all the gut bacteria that survives in humanity during reproduction and viruses and bacteria that invade and hitch rides. You can view humans as the life form or you can view the bacteria within us as the life form and humans are the organic machine they’ve constructed and control (eg look at how the gut/brain connection can effect your mood and decision making without you even being conscious to it)

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#107

Post by simiones »

asow92 wrote: post #71
simiones wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because birds are not humans. To be fair, "unnatural" is sometimes extended to refer to "life" instead of "humans", typically only when talking about the evolution of life or the search for extraterrestrial life. In that sense, then, yes - bird nests or termite mounds or coral reefs are unnatural. A more common wording for this same idea is something like "not created by geological processes".

> We are, truly, Of Nature, not Above Nature. What gives humans the special designation of their byproducts being unnatural?

You're asking the question backwards. We have a concept, "byproduct of human action". We needed a word for this concept. We more or less arbitrarily chose "unnatural" or "artificial" as the words for this concept.

You can argue that "unnatural" was a bad choice for this concept. But that's irrelevant to what words mean. There are other words like this - for example, "antisemitic" means "something that is against Jewish people", even though "semitic" means "of Jewish or Arabic or Phoenician etc. descent". So something discriminatory against semitic peoples is not necessarily anti-semitic.

Natural language doesn't follow strict logical rules. And of course, natural language is in fact itself an artificial, unnatural, construct.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#109

Post by simiones »

asow92 wrote: post #64
simiones wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the line is typically drawn at any human intervention. I doubt many humans consider steaks to be a naturally occurring phenomenon. Now, there is a secondary fuzzy notion of "artificial" typically used in relation to "chemicals". I don't think that definition stands up to most serious scrutiny, and is at any rate unrelated to this article.

That's exactly what's being—albeit atypically—advocated for here: That even steaks are a naturally occurring byproduct of humans and cows because humans and cows naturally exist.

Sure, but then of course absolutely everything is "naturally occurring". Plastic is a naturally occurring substance, computers are naturally occurring objects, C++ is a natural language. Perhaps then only miracles from God (for those who believe in such things) are unnatural?

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#110

Post by digging »

paxys wrote: post #20
ta8645 wrote: post #5

Can't help but wonder, is AI an expected phase transition in the evolution of life in the universe? Is life really just the larval stage of a higher order intelligence?

No, because AI is (for now at least) shaped and constrained by us humans rather than developing free based on the laws of the universe. Is it really "evolution" if a judge can rule that it violates copyright and stop all progress overnight? Or a random developer can add a bit of code to make sure the answers appease the right set of people? What we have today is a crude software approximation mimicking what we think…

> shaped and constrained by us humans rather than developing free based on the laws of the universe

This logic doesn't hold. Humans are part of the universe and obey all its laws. It's arbitrary to say bacteria and bonobos and stone tools are naturally occurring but AI aren't. We distinguish them because we're conscious and we have the experience of choice, but to say our creations aren't natural to the universe implies that our consciousness is not a natural phenomenon.

Post reply on HN