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

171–180 of 404 posts

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

#171

Post by johngossman »

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,…

Stephen Gould wrote a whole book disputing this idea that the complexity of life increases: "Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin." The basic argument is that almost all life on Earth is still prokaryotic...the rest of us are just a rounding error. He wrote several books about how evolution was not directional, notably "Wonderful Life" and "Time's Arrow". I'm not completely convinced by any of these, but worth reading.

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

#172

Post by namaria »

WaxProlix wrote: post #141
jmcqk6 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out the work of Ilya Prigogine - he won a Nobel prize in the 70's for his work on self-organizing complexity. There is a selection force in the universe for increasing complexity, being driven by the dissipation of energy. When you have systems in non-equilibrium, there is a strong pressure to explore the possibility space to find ever more efficient ways to dissipate energy. A bacteria the size of a grain of s…

So we're all agents of Entropy, spinning our circles until we die all in the service of heat death? I don't like it!

I don't understand this view at all. We are what we are. Entropy is a concept in our mind and heat death is a very particular phenomenon that depends on the systems experiencing it being very specifically defined in ways that the Universe cannot be.

We are. Descartes had the right idea. The experience of consciousness is irreducible. To say "we are atoms thinking" and variations thereof is utterly meaningless. All words and concepts used for such word play is dependent on the experience of human consciousness. They don't exist independently. Consciousness is the only thing we can posit that has independent existence. Everything else is just a concept created by a conscious being.

It's like the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. A universe without consciousness experiencing it really exists? Existence is a property of consciousness. We can't conceive of things that are not experienced, by definition. Even if we imagine a dead universe with just energy and no consciousness, that is an image that exists inside of a conscious mind.

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

#173

Post by jmcqk6 »

johngossman wrote: post #162

There is a whole genre of these, starting with (as mentioned in the paper's introduction) "What is Life?" by Schrodinger. I've been idly working my way through a bunch of them, including Monod's "Chance and Necessity" (dated but excellent), Nick Lane's whole series of books (notably "The Vital Question"), Nurse's "What is Life?" (good if you want to learn about yeast), Zimmer's "Life's Edge" (haven't finished it yet,…

It's a complex topic. I think it really got kicked off with "What is Life?" and we've been able to build more details on it since then. There are many parts of the story that we know in incredible details. Chaos theory, information theory, non-equillibrium thermodynamics, complexity and emergence, auto-catalytic chemistry are all just parts of it, and each one are massive fields of study on their own.

I'm not sure there will ever be a synthesis of all these things that creates a paradigm of some sort. There's simply too much.

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

#174

Post by willmadden »

gfodor wrote: post #167
lutusp wrote: post #164

"Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe? (arxiv.org)" Easily answered: * We don't know how consciousness comes into being, indeed we can't rigorously define it or unambiguously identify its presence or absence. * We believe we have it, but we aren't sure whether other animals and/or objects possess it. * Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all ma…

That's not an answer, that's an argument. Occam's Razor isn't like the second law of thermodynamics. It's a heuristic.

The paper defines life as a chemical reaction, which is also a heuristic. We do not know if aspects of "life" exist outside of our present understanding of physics. It's great to claw away at the edges, but I don't think anyone can answer the question "what is life?" at this point.

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

#175

Post by xmonkee »

lutusp wrote: post #164

"Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe? (arxiv.org)" Easily answered: * We don't know how consciousness comes into being, indeed we can't rigorously define it or unambiguously identify its presence or absence. * We believe we have it, but we aren't sure whether other animals and/or objects possess it. * Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all ma…

I agree with the overall thrust of your argument, but I disagree with this one somewhat:

> Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption.

An even simpler first few steps:

* We experience matter, but we aren't sure if matter exists outside of our experience of it

* Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter exists only within our consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption.

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

#176

Post by [deleted] »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #169
manmal wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. Do you have an intuition for why there is selection pressure towards energy dissipation?

My current intuition goes something like this: Energy MUST flow. No matter how energy is captured and stored, there is a pressure for it to continue moving. The movement of energy means that matter is always moving, and new configurations are always being "discovered." Some configurations allow for energy to flow more easily, and when one of those configurations is "discovered" the movement of energy keeps that confi…

[deleted]

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

#177

Post by mensetmanusman »

lutusp wrote: post #164

"Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe? (arxiv.org)" Easily answered: * We don't know how consciousness comes into being, indeed we can't rigorously define it or unambiguously identify its presence or absence. * We believe we have it, but we aren't sure whether other animals and/or objects possess it. * Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all ma…

Is there evidence of consciousness in a rock?

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

#178

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

libeclipse wrote: post #138
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #84

Reading the introductory paragraph to the paper, it sounds like a rehash of Kaufmann's (very good) book "At Home in the Universe", which at this point is almost 30 years old. Not sure what this paper adds, but will read it to find out. The thesis of Kaufmann's book is that the emergence of life, given supporting conditions (variety of source chemicals in environment, sources of energy, maybe water/mixing) is all but…

Did you see the authors of the paper?

Yes - that's what I meant. Kaufmann rehashing his old work (but presumably adding something to it too).

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

#180

Post by dvt »

namaria wrote: post #172
WaxProlix wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we're all agents of Entropy, spinning our circles until we die all in the service of heat death? I don't like it!

I don't understand this view at all. We are what we are. Entropy is a concept in our mind and heat death is a very particular phenomenon that depends on the systems experiencing it being very specifically defined in ways that the Universe cannot be. We are. Descartes had the right idea. The experience of consciousness is irreducible. To say "we are atoms thinking" and variations thereof is utterly meaningless. All wo…

> Existence is a property of consciousness.

Kant would vehemently disagree. Not that I'm a Kantian, but he makes some pretty good points. So I think there's a lot of work here that needs to be done to make your argument stronger.

Post reply on HN