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

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

#191

Post by [deleted] »

vlovich123 wrote: post #106
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 bact…

[deleted]

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

#192

Post by hughesjj »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #89
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,…

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…

I love it. Was susskind inspired by this at all with his complexity=action (duality) [1] hypothesis?

Theres a bunch of lectures of him on YouTube going off about how complexity increases asymptotically greater than entropy in a black hole, but I need to refresh myself on the lecture. Disclosure: I'm an idiot, and may be spewing nonsense

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA-duality

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

#193

Post by lukifer »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #177
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?

There isn’t the same kind of ontological boundary in a rock, as there is an organism.

My hunch is: there’s a low-grade subjectivity/qualia to all of the universe, which would include the particles of the rock, but the rock would not experience an independent “rock-ness”.

The consciousness of organisms are perhaps more like a dissociative state, analogous to a gravity well of subjectivity, such that the qualia are concentrated inside a boundary (the entity that is intelligently chasing energy differentials), and excluding most information outside this boundary.

The primary reason for this hunch is that “ouch” is an experience, rather than merely a mathematical/algorithmic update to a neural net (compare with artificial NN’s, chemical feedback loops, etc). An “ouch” is not needed to strengthen the signal; just tilt the training feedback stronger as necessary (-10,000 points to “eat the berry that made us sick”). And it seems prohibitively expensive expensive to bootstrap “strange loop” subjectivity merely to strengthen those numbers via an “ouch”.

But instead, if some form of subjectivity were to pre-exist, Darwinian pressures would co-opt it as an efficient feedback loop mechanism, and then iterate until arriving at the “consciousness” of animals and humans (including an incentive to pay more attention to qualia in the organism boundary, and only minimally outside it)

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

#194

Post by ixaxaar »

bordercases wrote: post #97
mjburgess wrote: post #3

This is written like a literary academic blog article rather than an academic paper in the sciences. It's fully of literary free association and hyperbolic language, etc. At best it's a sort of mission statement for what would need to be a research programme with many many academic papers behind it. As it is, I'm not sure what the authors aim here is. It's a blog post.

Stuart Kauffman is a figure in the field with much more difficult books if that's more to your liking. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-order...

I think Kauffman has been developing this set of ideas for a while now. I remember reading his "the origins of order" and find a lot of the ideas from the book here in more evolved forms. He really got me into visualising complex systems and their state spaces etc.

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

#195

Post by kurthr »

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…

What's interesting here is that life on earth has commonly defined has been around gathering negative entropy for several billion years (photosynthesis and the rise of oxygen for over 3 billion) and growing exponentially on earth. That is a sizeable fraction of the age of the universe. Human like ancestors have been using fire for over a million years (based on the oxygen generated above), agriculture for thousands, and industry for hundreds.

All of these are exponential increases in energy density, entropy generation, and negative entropy consumption. To not describe them as phase changes is odd. It's telling that economic growth over the last 4000 years (first farming and now industry in the last ~400) also appear to be exponential over several orders of magnitude. Whether there's a quick end to this or not is an open question, but they still look like phase changes. That weather is starting to be affected is equally telling.

A conflation of consciousness with life seems weird, though. If ordered psuedo-crystals are life (or clay-RNA / DNA crystals) or even viruses are life, I don't know anyone claiming they're conscious. It would be like assuming life caused capitalism or industry, when certainly they fit very different exponential curves. Making arguments that industrialization (use of power other than human/animal work) isn't a "phase change" in economy would also be similarly strange.

Now, whether it "confronts physical laws" or requires an explanation, I have no idea. They do seem to be transitions at least as interesting as weather on Jupiter.

https://communities.springernature.com/posts/were-humans-the...

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

https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/longgrow.pdf

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

#196

Post by lioeters »

svieira wrote: post #186
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,…

In Count to the Eschaton the "grand project" is "the sophistication of all matter" and it's been going on since the beginning.

> The Count to the Eschaton Sequence is a six-novel series written by John C. Wright.

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

#197

Post by JUNGLEISMASSIVE »

adrianN wrote: post #131
forinti wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sun outputs 3.9 x 10^26W, but it weighs ~10^30kg, so that would mean 10^-4W/kg. Human beings are closer to 1W/kg at rest.

Now do a lump of plutonium.

[dead]

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

#198

Post by bell-cot »

adrianN wrote: post #131
forinti wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sun outputs 3.9 x 10^26W, but it weighs ~10^30kg, so that would mean 10^-4W/kg. Human beings are closer to 1W/kg at rest.

Now do a lump of plutonium.

Which isotope? It makes quite a difference, and there's no "naturally occurring" with Pu.

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

#199

Post by mensetmanusman »

forinti wrote: post #143
conesus wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did that lump of plutonium become a lump? That part wasn’t natural.

Life is a great entropy accelerator.

compared to a black hole though?

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

#200

Post by ixaxaar »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #173
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 th…

I think the complexity researchers over the years have created a wide range of tooling for analysing complex systems across a large number of domains.

Consider complexity economics, computational social sciences, network sciences and cascading networks, evolutionary theories, parts of systems biology, connectomics and computational neuroscience etc.

The Santa Fe institute has been at the forefront and has an amazing collections of publications in their own press. David krakaeur's book "Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute" is like a 20 year survey paper and an amazing read.

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