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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?

#271

Post by lurker616 »

pocketarc wrote: post #121
vlovich123 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that is a far more fun way of looking at it! But the bacteria aren't the whole story - we also have our own cells, all doing their thing and all participating (even if bacteria in us are -also- participating). We're just groups of trillions of cells all working together to keep themselves alive and reproducing. And then we go work together with other blobs of trillions of cells, just to further that goal: sur…

So each of us is basically an AGI for the tiny cells

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

#273

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jamesblonde wrote: post #209
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…

You forgot to mention that Prigogine's model includes a system boundary. Within the system, the 2nd law of thermodynamics no longer holds - the system does not tend towards entropy, as the system ingests energy and exports entropy.

Put in Prigogine's terms: the system is not at, and does not reach, equilibrium (the state that most other chemical science tends to assume).

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

#274

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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…

Tweak your intuition: energy IS motion. When things are not moving, there is no energy. When there is energy, things are moving.

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

#275

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

nyssos wrote: post #255
sydbarrett74 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if this question is answered elsewhere in this post's replies, but would you say that matter can be viewed as 'captured' energy, or energy at rest?

> matter can be viewed as 'captured' energy, or energy at rest? No, matter isn't 'captured' energy any more than it's 'captured' mass or momentum. Energy is a quantity, not a substance.

Energy is a behavior, or alternatively a probability.

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

#276

Post by creer »

digging wrote: post #268
creer wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digitization is one direction but I think augmentation is perhaps a more likely one. Or a first one. Digitization can follow in a "Ship of Theseus" fashion. And augmentation branches then in AI as symbiont versus AI as desktop assistant.

> Digitization is one direction but I think augmentation is perhaps a more likely one. Or a first one. First seems likely, but as a permanent alternative I don't know why a species would eschew lightspeed transportation and effortless immortality for the fragility and slowness of an organic body. It's possible there are good reasons, but I don't know of any.

Digitization, upload, has always seemed to me an iffy goal. The brains' packaging doesn't seem very amenable to any of our current technologies, as far as being able to "read" it. And then once read emulating it seems just as difficult.

Once uploaded comes the issue of getting computing time to run it (the economics and politics of prefering run time of X over run time of Y). And maintaining the computing platform. Certainly there are immense advantages to the digitized form - of course.

By contrast, augmentation (which is what we already do) seems straightforward. And seems to fit current society "easily" (haha - or let's say it will be tough enough as a first stage.)

So that from the point of view of a next epoch in life forms, AI fits more immediately in the struggle of AI as symbiont, AI as independent, or AI as desktop assistant.

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

#277

Post by JoeAltmaier »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #274
jmcqk6 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tweak your intuition: energy IS motion. When things are not moving, there is no energy. When there is energy, things are moving.

Then energy is relative? An object is 'stationary' in space, a comet comes along and hits it. The comet has energy.

OR the comet is just sitting there, 'stationary', the object hits it. Not the object has energy.

There's no total energy to a system, except calculated from some point of view?

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

#278

Post by paulpauper »

nh23423fefe wrote: post #241
paulpauper wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

arxiv is suffering from major mission/feature creep. IMHO, it should be limited to math and physics and maybe quantitative finance. There are too many low quality or blog-like papers being published. Maybe it would be better if it was spun off to a different website.

>arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv. How does arxiv suffer? What mission creep? What do you mean too many?

it used to be just math and physics

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

#279

Post by mr_toad »

drewrv wrote: post #244
evanb wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sun's power density is approximately the same as compost.

Can you elaborate on that or drop a link that explains more?

The rate of fusion in the Suns core is actually very slow and gram for gram it is not producing much energy. But the core of the Sun is well insulated by the vast bulk of itself, so even a slow release of energy builds up to extreme temperatures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Structure_and_fusion

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

#280

Post by api »

I've had a speculation about the Fermi paradox for years. I call it the uniform cooling hypothesis. Not sure if it's original or not. The idea builds on the present cosmological model that considers the universe to all be of the same age.

If the emergence of complex life in the universe is a threshold or phase transition effect, it might not happen until the universe reaches a certain age in which all conditions are satisfied. At this point you'd have the "simultaneous" (at geologic time scales) emergence of complex life all over the place.

If this were the case, what if for some reason (such as multiple overlapping factors all having to be satisfied) the standard deviation in the time dimension is actually small? In other words what if life emerges or hits certain evolutionary milestones at about the same time +/- a fairly narrow window like one million years.

If that were the case then the universe would be full of things more or less about as advanced as we are, but very few that are vastly more advanced. The probability of one of those few very advanced outliers existing in, say, this galaxy might be relatively small. Intergalactic travel is many orders of magnitude harder than interstellar travel (which is already brutally hard) and would take millions of years even near the speed of light, so even something like a Kardashev type II or transitional type III civilization wouldn't be likely to cross between galaxies. Something like that could be out there but insanely distant and completely undetectable.

We wouldn't see alien interstellar probes, starships, or techno-signatures from anything large scale enough to be detectable because for the most part these things don't exist yet.

Would also imply that once we build a starship, that's about the time we should expect to encounter starships. It would be a cosmic-scale version of the principle (and apparent historical pattern) that steam engines appear when it is "steam engine time." Maybe it's just not starship time yet.

If the standard deviation is very narrow, you'd have this weird interstellar trick or treat night event where the probes and starships start arriving at about the same time everywhere in the entire universe.

At this point maybe everyone exchanges knowledge and technology and you have an insane explosion in complexity, sort of a cosmic Cambrian explosion, and then you get Kardashev type II and III civilizations and onward.

Zoom way, way out and it looks like a sudden phase transition of the entire universe from being dominated by non-living physical processes to being dominated by living processes.

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