231–240 of 404 posts
As soon as I see a supposed scientific paper that was typeset in Microsoft Word, I know it's going to be trash. It's not a perfect heuristic, but it's like 99%+.
HN is now a hangout for PMs and wannabe nontechnical founders who want to feel cool.
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> unless AI augments our brains somehow Frankly, the more I think about AI, the less sense it makes to me that biological, single-body humans have any place in the future. As soon as we can digitize our minds, why wouldn't people begin to do so? Bodies could be inhabited at will, and death will be a thing of the past as we're able to store backups. I'm sure some will refuse and be left behind, just as we have Amish c…
Once flying cars are as cheap and easy to own and operate as regular cars, why would anyone buy a non-flying car?
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.
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The theory is that they are one in the same, or better to say that entropy is the process that drives life. In that, life grows in complexity in order to dissipate heat (i.e., increase entropy) more efficiently. Just look at Earth. Life is incredibly complex but is ultimately driving everything towards dust.
> entropy is the process that drives life Depending on how you look at it, life is driven by the opposite of entropy. Schrödinger in his book, What is Life? , calls it "negative entropy" or even "free energy". > In the 1944 book What is Life?, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who in 1933 had won the Nobel Prize in Physics, theorized that life – contrary to the general tendency dictated by the second law of therm…
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...
https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/ilya...
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,…
Maybe that's what the abstract referred to as "the Theory of the Adjacent Possible"? I've only read the abstract.
But your argument of ecosystem complexity is totally valid. Though I guess if an ecosystem decreases in complexity, then it has to end up in a different type of simplicity than it was the last time it was there, because otherwise you already know that it evolves out of that spot (assuming some amount of determinism).
Temporarily, though, this can and does happen. Invasive species often obliterate a lot of complexity, presumably until either their weaknesses are discovered through the very changing conditions that allowed the natives to flourish in the first place, or until they evolve complexity of their own.
There's another way to derive increasing complexity from a small number of laws, though. There are multiple resources and multiple ways to access them. Optimizing for any one of those results in overspecializing and becoming less fit for accessing most of the others. There's no one best answer that works for everything. You always have a delicate balance between overgeneralizing and overspecializing, and the area between those provides a lot of different ecological niches, and even more if you look at the battle stretched out over time. (The configurations are unstable; you could have a thousand species optimized for particular resources that get clobbered by a generalist that poisons the specialists, then the energy required by the poisoners makes them lose out to generalist nonpoisoners, which enables specialization again, not to mention evolved immunity... the wheel goes round and round, picking up crud as it rolls.)
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I don't think we have any tools that could possibly detect bacterial life anywhere where we don't have a physical presence at the moment. That is, even if Venus were teeming with simple life on every square cm, I don't think any of our instruments could pick it up unless we send a probe to collect and analyze samples. So, at the moment we have no hope of detecting this type of life outside the solar system even if it…
We've got photos from the surface of Venus: https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-... It's visibly not covered in moss, fungus, grasses, algae, slime. On Earth we talk about hot hydrothermal vents underwater: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/survival-at-hydrothermal-vent... - this says " the Pompeii worm [...] is one of the most heat-resistant multicellular animals on the planet, able to withstand…
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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…
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,…
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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…
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.
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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 absolutely adore the simplicity behind this: Energy must balance, so it flows from high concentrations to lower concentrations. Things that help that flow are selected for. From that springs everything we are. Utterly amazing to me that from a gradient plus some random chemicals plus time equals humans, sex, violence, loss, birth, love, games, music, and so much more. All just to help the earth cool down a little b…