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Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare?

nautil.us

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Re: Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare?

#21

Post by bduerst »

philh wrote: post #16
bduerst wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The order in a deck of cards is unique, but it's not complex . The nucleotide sequence in a chromosome is unique and complex. An analogy of your comparison would be comparing a single sentence to the sum of mankind's written works, with the latter being life. A complex, organized source of information like that is special.

If you shuffle a deck of 3 billion cards, the order is less compressible than the human genome. It's still not special. Is it complex, by your definition? How about my scribble, or a snowflake?

It would be complex but no longer unique.

If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a single cell?

Re: Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare?

#22

Post by philh »

rnovak wrote: post #18
philh wrote: post #8

Of course not. Shuffle a deck of cards. If you did it properly, the new arrangement is unique. No deck of cards has ever been arranged like that before, and none will ever again, unless you deliberately preserve it. I just drew a scribble on a post-it note. Nobody else has a scribble quite like it, or ever will again, after I throw it away. Every time a snowflake melts, something beautiful and unique is lost forever.…

The dictionary definition of special is "really weird"? Literally: "better, greater, or otherwise different from what is usual." So...if a snowflake is "beautiful" and "unique", you have the necessary and sufficient conditions for "special". Just saying....

That definition is meaningless without a distance metric (for "different") or a scoring function (for "better, greater"). And some reference point for "usual" - are we comparing this snowflake to all the other snowflakes? To a grain of sand?[1] To every other subset of atoms in the universe?

In the context of this article, I'm pretty sure "special" is intended to mean things like "valuable [to humans]" and "worth preserving [to humans]", and to distinguish life from mundane things like snowflakes and scribbles. It seems really weird to me, to ask "is life special just because it's rare?" in a context where the word "special" applies to snowflakes.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sand_under_electron_...

Re: Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare?

#23

Post by philh »

bduerst wrote: post #21
philh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you shuffle a deck of 3 billion cards, the order is less compressible than the human genome. It's still not special. Is it complex, by your definition? How about my scribble, or a snowflake?

It would be complex but no longer unique. If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a single cell?

Why would a shuffle of 3 billion distinct cards be less unique than a shuffle of 52 distinct cards?

> If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a single cell?

No. It would be a unique string of worthless jibberish.

Meanwhile, the instructions for a Saturn V rocket have probably been written down in at least two places. So if you have a copy of them, they're less unique than my random string, yet more special.

Re: Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare?

#24

Post by bduerst »

philh wrote: post #23
bduerst wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be complex but no longer unique. If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a single cell?

Why would a shuffle of 3 billion distinct cards be less unique than a shuffle of 52 distinct cards? > If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a single cell? No. It would be a unique string of worthless jibberish. Meanwhile, the instructions for a Saturn V rocket have probably been written down in at least two places.…

Right, the information is unique, not the medium.

There are multiple copies of the Saturn V blueprints, just as there are multiple copies of the human genome in your cells.

Is Lord of the Rings not unique because it's stored on multiple mediums?

Re: Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare?

#25

Post by Armisael16 »

hammock wrote: post #19
tlb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although, there's no known mechanism by which ships get all their parts replaced while preserving their function without some life forms involved.

That is closer to the heart of what makes life unique, in that life can (and does, as a matter of existence) decrease entropy. At least locally. Life will rebuild a ship instead of watch it rot.

All sorts of processes locally reduce entropy - any solidifying liquid will meet that benchmark.

Re: Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare?

#26

Post by Armisael16 »

yason wrote: post #17

In this universe, for whatever its nature happens to be, where laws of entropy realize themselves relentlessly and indefinitely to increase chaos forever, bit by bit; where everything left to rot will eventually turn into pieces, shards, and break apart into dust there is―I might say―a force, or at least a mechanism―again, whether guided or scientifically spontaneous―that is working its way on the same river as this…

Fire does all of that too. Is it alive?

Re: Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare?

#27

Post by unabst »

If 1) we are part of the universe, and 2) we generate meaning, then 3) we are the meaning generators of the universe. The universe is meaningless only when we look out and ignore life, and ignore ourselves. But the universe has us, and has life. We are significant, not because we are more important, but simply for being a part of it all. We exist. We're here. That say's it all.

The moment we tied the emergence of what we perceived as metaphysical to something physical, it all became physical and the ghosts disappeared along with the word metaphysics from our sciences. The mind-body duality was non-scientific.

The same can be done with the exceptional view on life. The moment we tie the emergence of what we perceive as special to everything mundane, it all becomes mundane, and life is no longer special. Special is subjective. If we concede to the emergence of life from non-life, then it's either all non-life, or it's all life -- or we could decide to call it something else.

Much of the awe we express through pieces like this can be attributed to the fact that sheer scale still never fails to baffle us. Distance, complexity, time, and probability all become "dramatic" once they become intuitively disproportionate. But the universe as a whole is just as complex as it is, and pointing to two places and comparing their complexity says nothing about the capacity of the universe. The universe is huge, it's old, it's chaotic, and everything in it is rare. But baffled it is not. Or rather, it is, just through us.

Re: Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare?

#28

Post by cousin_it »

philh wrote: post #16
bduerst wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The order in a deck of cards is unique, but it's not complex . The nucleotide sequence in a chromosome is unique and complex. An analogy of your comparison would be comparing a single sentence to the sum of mankind's written works, with the latter being life. A complex, organized source of information like that is special.

If you shuffle a deck of 3 billion cards, the order is less compressible than the human genome. It's still not special. Is it complex, by your definition? How about my scribble, or a snowflake?

Maybe along with Kolmogorov complexity we could measure "usefulness" of a bit string, i.e. how much utility an agent would agree to pay for it. The idea is that "complex" things, like life, are likely to contain solutions to many problems we care about. Of course that approach depends on the agent, but maybe you could get a general definition by referring to a general agent, like AIXItl.

Re: Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare?

#29

Post by adamio »

Retra wrote: post #7
TeMPOraL wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This way we could say the entire universe is just a big chemical reaction. It wouldn't even be an incorrect view. It just wouldn't be useful for anything. This is the real value of models and concepts we use - not their grand philosophical sense, but how useful they are. We set up boundaries between creatures, define concepts like life and death because they allow us to understand and predict the world better. It's u…

"It just wouldn't be useful for anything." It is useful for something. It's just not useful for problems that require a high degree of specificity. And not all problems do; in fact, some are hindered by it. (For instance, focussing on individual atoms won't really help you do politics.)

single atoms no, but splitting atoms.. maybe

Re: Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare?

#30

Post by rnovak »

philh wrote: post #22
rnovak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dictionary definition of special is "really weird"? Literally: "better, greater, or otherwise different from what is usual." So...if a snowflake is "beautiful" and "unique", you have the necessary and sufficient conditions for "special". Just saying....

That definition is meaningless without a distance metric (for "different") or a scoring function (for "better, greater"). And some reference point for "usual" - are we comparing this snowflake to all the other snowflakes? To a grain of sand?[1] To every other subset of atoms in the universe? In the context of this article, I'm pretty sure "special" is intended to mean things like "valuable [to humans]" and "worth pre…

First off, random !== unique, not even close, ESPECIALLY for things with discrete properties.

We know from the pigeon-hole principal, that from enough instances, something will be repeated. So, unique it is not.

In your card example, there are 52! (factorial) permutations, but if you shuffle a deck of cards (52! + 1) times, you will have repeated at least one permutation at least once. It's been proven, you can't avoid it.

The permutation is pseudo-random however, meaning that we cannot distinguish it from pure chance.

But, beyond that, special !== valuable. Those words are different, not synonyms. Same to "worth preserving", it's not a valid meaning of "special".

Furthermore, life isn't just random, there are seemingly an infinite number of variables that influence it. That's not discrete, meaning it's beyond "just random", it actually can be unique, such that even with infinite time, it might not ever be repeated.

So yes, life is special, it's not just a permutation, at least, it hasn't been proven to be so yet.

Additionally, I'd rather view life as being special that live in a world where everything is considered "mundane".

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