Tweak your intuition: energy IS motion. When things are not moving, there is no energy. When there is energy, things are moving.
How would you describe a rock sitting on the top of a mountain? It is not moving relative to the matter around it, but it certainly contains quite a bit of energy, in a variety of different forms. I am trying to recognize that even in that rock, energy is dissipating in multiple ways, and any number of different events can lead to it dissipating in different ways. I suppose you can say that the individual atoms compo…
potential energy is. IMO, largely a pedagogical tool. it's an explanatory position, rather than a thing.
the rock, does, obviously "contain" energy thanks to e=mc2. but the notion that the rock is energetically in a different state as it sits on top of the mountain that when it sits at the bottom never sat well with me in high school, and it still doesn't, 45 years later.
If you'd like yet another somewhat similar inquiry into the information-theory-based definition of life, I'll mention Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle.
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…
I've been on this same journey through the Santa Fe institute pubs on this topic, which all started in a weird place because I wondered what kind of bizarre scientific research outfit had cormac McCarthy on staff as an artist in residence apart from the rest of the conspicuously multidisciplinary luminaries. What a unique, strange, and special intellectual atmosphere they must have had going in their prime and hopefully the best days are ahead still. It seems hard to compare to anything else.. one thinks of bell labs but probably only the peak of the Vienna circle comes close. We need more places with artists, philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists rubbing shoulders in the halls.
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 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.
The Lex Fridman interview with Lee Cronin "Controversial Nature Paper on Evolution of Life and Universe" really opened my eyes. I find myself agreeing with the essential points Lee lays out, that there is a mathematical / physics-based definition for life or life-like systems such as advanced AI and robotics.
Ok. What's an example of something low but non-zero on the spectrum of life? I'm having trouble thinking of one that isn't more properly "life-like".
Viruses? New understandings of mega-viruses have let us to believe that the line is really quite fuzzy. Some of these larger viruses have double stranded DNA, some have ribosome like functions, some have ERs, etc. Kinda like a cell, but missing random parts that make them truly alive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandoravirus
You can also consider a virus a loosely coupled form, which really increases the size of the virus, since it requires its platform to propagate.
I don't think you understand my point or what Schrodinger wrote. The Wikipedia synopsis of Schrodinger is unlikely to be accurate. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o... https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/ilya...
Thank you, I'm familiar with the work of Ilya Prigogine, and the first linked article is one of my favorites that I've read several times. The relationship between life and entropy is a fascinating topic for sure.
Can't help but wonder, is AI an expected phase transition in the evolution of life in the universe? Is life really just the larval stage of a higher order intelligence?
Imagine if this was indeed the case, what a time to be alive! We're witnessing the moment as the noise in the sonogram morphs into a recognizable shape of a baby. It's our heritage, our future generation, human 2.0, Machina Sapiens.
Literally created after our own image too. I'm so proud I could cry.
How would you describe a rock sitting on the top of a mountain? It is not moving relative to the matter around it, but it certainly contains quite a bit of energy, in a variety of different forms. I am trying to recognize that even in that rock, energy is dissipating in multiple ways, and any number of different events can lead to it dissipating in different ways. I suppose you can say that the individual atoms compo…
potential energy is. IMO, largely a pedagogical tool. it's an explanatory position, rather than a thing. the rock, does, obviously "contain" energy thanks to e=mc2. but the notion that the rock is energetically in a different state as it sits on top of the mountain that when it sits at the bottom never sat well with me in high school, and it still doesn't, 45 years later.
It takes energy to move a rock to the top of a mountain, and you can get some of that energy back (minus friction etc) if you let it roll down. So it's got something.
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…
So where's the bacteria outcompeting moon dust? Theories which make life inevitable are inherently shaky because we have 1 sample.
You can't have theories without life to conceive of them, so in fact life is inevitable under any theory.
Nothing can be made or manufactured that is unnatural or artificial. By definition, anything that can exist in this universe is naturally part of the universe.
> By definition, anything that can exist in this universe is naturally part of the universe. Agreed. > Nothing can be made or manufactured that is unnatural or artificial. This doesn't follow in any way, not with the definition I gave, or with any definition I have ever heard. How do you define "artificial" such that an iMac is not artificial? I've told you my definition (anything created by a human that is not an an…
> How do you define "artificial" such that an iMac is not artificial?
I don’t. iMacs are made of naturally-occurring materials. Those materials are mined or refined or formed in laboratories and factories, then assembled into something we call an iMac. All of those materials and processes are part of this universe and occur within the laws of then universe. They are all natural.
There really is nothing artificial in this regard. But that doesn’t mean some things aren’t detrimental to our health or well-being or the well-being of other life.