For something to be expected, someone must be expecting it. And to be able to expect things, you must be alive. This proves something, but I'm not sure what...
"I think therefore I am"
Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
211–220 of 404 posts
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#212I 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 o…
Recommend reading along with order out of chaos and anything from Prigogine in the 80s (not his last book).
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#213It'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. A lot of lifeforms evolve to be more simple, not more complex -- I think what you have is sort of a distribution of complexity, and as life continues to evolve, the upper bound keeps getting pushed up as some organisms push the boundary of complexity, but I don't think it's at all true that in general life involves to be more complex.
Arguably, viruses exist by shedding as much complexity as possible. Trim their genome to the absolute minimum which can still propagate.
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#214Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#215I personally believe that the origin of life started with something we would not recognize as such today. I imagine that it started with some long molecules in water and they have the ability to grow longer and longer. Maybe they looped around and the dynamics of the system meant that if they oriented toward the sun better they would be more numerous. Maybe if their composition was a little bit different they would acquire material from the surrounding bath more efficiently. This creates a gradient of success where the topmost molecules will do better than the bottom most molecules. Similar perturbations would allow them to acquire more material more efficiently in a pantomime of eating. Reproduction would be something as simple as breaking in half. This is of course a just so story, but it's one that I find pretty compelling. But I would like it if people thought more about what these early systems looked like rather than be so hand wavy. I think it's unlikely that any of these very early forms of life survive as they were consumed by subsequent generations. It also seems unlikely that they would form very often spontaneously such that we might find examples in nature. If such a form develops only once in a million years in a planet-wide irradiated bath, then we would have a huge challenge. Even simulating such a system to find what that structure might be. So instead I think we should use our imaginations and imagine what the simplest possible system could possibly work in that circumstance to bootstrap life.
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 con…
It is also possible that your defined level of consciousness will reach zero at certain level of entropy. Or it is possible that the signal processing speed will decrease to the level to be effectively zero in any meaningful time scale.
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#217It'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.
This isn't true- many things evolved to be simpler over time. For example, some viruses are beleived to have evolved from parasitic bacteria, which themselves evolved from free living bacteria. Many other parasites have simplified and lost the ability to survive without a host. You also have examples like many cave and underground animals losing eye sight and pigmentation. Also consider things like marine mammals losing limbs land mammals had, and many sedentary/fixed marine invertebrates evolving from free swimming ones.
There are costs to complexity, and so organisms evolve it when needed, and lose it quickly when it isn't giving an advantage... there is not an "arrow of complexity" that only moves one direction.
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#218Earlier 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.
Wow, that's a great way of describing this! Definitely noted for future use.
Really brings up the difference between the energy density of the fusion reaction and the energy density of fusion plus the confinement system to enable the reaction!
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#219There 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 been a while, but in this vein I enjoyed Chaitin’s Toward a Mathematical definition of “Life”: http://home.thep.lu.se/~henrik/mnxa09/Chaitin1979.pdf
Blew my mind as I started to wrap my brain around information theory.
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#220There 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,…
"life is the process from birth until death"
"life is the way to make anything happen to you"
without a body (via life), a consciousness cant do anything