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How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

nautil.us

31–40 of 55 posts

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#31
post #7

> For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods. Writers who proclaim that English has no translation for word x from language y , only to provide a matter-of-fact translation in the very next clause/sentence always make me chuckle. Or they provoke pedantic ire. Depends on ho…

word != phrase

While that may be true the difference becomes a lot smaller when you are talking about compound words and phrases.

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#32
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea the author seems to try to hint at is what i would call a Functor if we were talking about Categories: - Language games have structure - Structures can be compared by correspondences/functions - A particular concept in one language game therefore could be transported along such a correspondence into another language game. - We don't have a good correspondence between the language games of biology and physics…

> It occurs to me that my analogy with categories and functors is itself a transport between the language game of category theory and the language game of language games. Bahahahahaha! Brilliant. If I remember my category theory correctly, wouldn't this mean that you've discovered a Monad between the language game of category theory and the language game of language games? If so, we could create the most incomprehens…

Ah no, no monads here i'm afraid :)

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#33
post #15

Addy Pross wrote a similar paper in 2011, but the neologism then was "dynamic kinetic stability" https://aeon.co/essays/paradoxes-of-stability-how-life-began... http://www.bgu.ac.il/~pross/PDF-10.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3843823/ The upshot is that life is its own state of matter, essentially a self-stabilizing repeating pattern of matter and energy, like a waterfall or a chemical clock.

Kinda reminds me of the old teleology.

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#34
post #29
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never the complicated words. It's the simple words. English doesn't have a translation for German Brot. The English word bread denotes something almost but not entirely unlike Brot.

The criticisms ring hollow when you have to use a bunch of different languages to show the supposed paucity of English. Does German have a wabi-sabi? Does Japanese have a waldeinsamkeit? It's a similar thing with animals, when people say humans are useless animals because we can't swim as well as dolphins or see as well as hawks, even though we swim better than hawks and see better than dolphins...

It's not a criticism, it's just an observation.

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#35
post #7

> For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods. Writers who proclaim that English has no translation for word x from language y , only to provide a matter-of-fact translation in the very next clause/sentence always make me chuckle. Or they provoke pedantic ire. Depends on ho…

I have never heard the word "Waldeinsamkeit" before and I'm a German native speaker.

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#36
post #7

> For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods. Writers who proclaim that English has no translation for word x from language y , only to provide a matter-of-fact translation in the very next clause/sentence always make me chuckle. Or they provoke pedantic ire. Depends on ho…

"There are no synonyms." [1]

Does "apple" in English truly equal "ringo" in Japanese? The context is similar, but the iconic implications and inferences are not an exact match. There is something uniquely American about "apple". Not "ringo", but "apple". Worth naming a company after even.

And that's just with a fruit. Can only imagine how asynonymous less concrete terms would be.

---

[1] Oddly, I hear this a lot recently. Quick search brings up Theodore Sturgeon who I wouldn't mind attributing this to at all.

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#38
post #35
post #7

> For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods. Writers who proclaim that English has no translation for word x from language y , only to provide a matter-of-fact translation in the very next clause/sentence always make me chuckle. Or they provoke pedantic ire. Depends on ho…

I have never heard the word "Waldeinsamkeit" before and I'm a German native speaker.

Me too but in German you can make compound words out of anything. I mean Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften anyone?

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#39
It's a shame there is a huge lack of technical details here... maybe there is a profound thing that has been discovered, but I can't tell because the article is vague and describes the mundane and obvious in a grandiose style.

Re: How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

#40
post #6

Can somebody explain what does Wittgenstein have to do with the whole thing?

If anything, the author could have gone into Wittgenstein more, but she did cover a lot of ground... My stab at it:

Before Wittgenstein philosophers were obsessed with the factual nature of words and tried mapping everything correctly (logically) with the natural world. Except, they were failing.

Wittgenstein came in and basically said language was never designed to represent reality, but rather is what emerges from the use cases between people. Communication is a transaction ("game" in his words), and not some mathematical or logical construct. It may have such properties, and the people and the context are all real, so reality is involved, but language is not a direct output, nor does it need to directly correlate to resist contradiction or paradox -- which are abound in philosophy.

Except, for those who speak it, language is their reality. Those who cannot overcome their own immersion can never see past their own words, which sums up much of his opposition. They are all correct in their world and in their words... except Wittgenstein was talking about how words and worlds worked.

In short, words can be arbitrary, and are constrained by the goal to communicate and transact. This exact phenomenon which Wittgenstein described as what we are doing is the phenomena England is describing as what biological systems are doing.

It's all Dissipative Adaptation, with language being the unique construct for every such system that emerges and sustains it all.

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