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Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F "In the book, Schrödinger introduced the idea of an "aperiodic crystal" that contained genetic information in its configuration of covalent chemical bonds." Good to see it available (a classic; not so easy to lay hands on)
https://www.amazon.com/What-Life-Matter-Autobiographical-Ske...
Our definition of life is very narrow, mostly self-referential. Life is everything. Just because we can't consciously communicate with something it doesn't mean it's not alive. Why wouldn't Earth be alive? How about the sun, the stars and the universe? We love separating things by arbitrarily naming and defining them, but the universe is completely connected, we can't exist outside of it or disconnected from it. If a…
I think you may be familiar with the Global Brain hypothesis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain ): what if the Earth is a large network system? And you know, the network is the computer... Given the current empirical evidences we have, it's not particularity persuasive, but an extremely interesting imagination and proposal indeed.
I mean, when I speak I physically interact and transmit signals through air vibrations which we developed to both detect and interpret. Other perceptive "life" forms would have a hard time telling what we communicate about as well. Hell, we can barely if at all understand what other mammals communicate about despite their biophysical systems being incredibly similar to our own. Plants communicate with chemical signals and root/fungi networks.
Predicted pictures of the universe at large look eerily like the brain's structure as well.
Our definition of life is very narrow, mostly self-referential. Life is everything. Just because we can't consciously communicate with something it doesn't mean it's not alive. Why wouldn't Earth be alive? How about the sun, the stars and the universe? We love separating things by arbitrarily naming and defining them, but the universe is completely connected, we can't exist outside of it or disconnected from it. If a…
Basically, this concept looks at the causality of language in reverse.
I followed Shrodinger's ethos to its limits and all I got was perfectly isotropic relativistic spacetime foam.
I suppose that's what our universe will eventually decay into - and then what happens is up to anyones interpretation (conformal cyclic cosmology or what have you..)
I need to implement gravity, some type of coupling that can prevent equipartition of states from happening so quickly.
In any case, nothing interesting happens in small universes by the process of evolution. Evolution requires a balance between specifity of search/selectivity and magnitude. Less specificity will require more brute force magnitude. Just like any search of a space or data struct. Silicon just doesn't have the magnitude that even a mole of molecules does. Not even in the same ballpark.
The source is up here and easily portable to platform other than Windows
https://github.com/churchofthought/ScatterLife
I need to update the video - the video is before I added a projection matrix to fix the hexagonal skew.
Another framework but using complex valued cells: https://github.com/churchofthought/HexagonalComplexAutomata
Our definition of life is very narrow, mostly self-referential. Life is everything. Just because we can't consciously communicate with something it doesn't mean it's not alive. Why wouldn't Earth be alive? How about the sun, the stars and the universe? We love separating things by arbitrarily naming and defining them, but the universe is completely connected, we can't exist outside of it or disconnected from it. If a…
It's remarkable how much this still rings true today. The idea that we should try and understand life as a battle against the second law of thermodynamics has had a significant influence on many of today's great thinkers - such as Friston [1] and Dennett [2], as well as countless others. [1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.201... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ1YxR8qNpY
I've heard this called the "every refrigerator is a miracle" theory.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would phenomena like rocks crystallizing or stars forming also be a battle against the second law of thermodynamics?
Not sure. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, in his Aufbau der Physik argues/shows that the 2nd law is often misunderstood as leading to "goo". His take is that this is not so, rather it leads to skeletons. So rocks crystallising and stars forming would actually be going with the flow of the 2nd law, rather than battling against it.
Still, rocks and crystals are not quite an end state either, in a non expanding universe -- eventually they collide and crumble to dust.
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Exactly. The definition of life that is taught in school and widely cited is very limited to simply what we traditionally consider alive. But where are fr he lines drawn? Must life be conscious, or at least experience qualia? Does conciousness get more "real" in more complex organisms? (Is a fly just as alive as a horse is?) Why do we consider viruses to be not alive? Are our own bodies' cells alive? In what way? The…
The lines are drawn based on what biology we have available to us. If we ever discover alien biology, the lines might be drawn more broadly. But we don't know until then.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you may be familiar with the Global Brain hypothesis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain ): what if the Earth is a large network system? And you know, the network is the computer... Given the current empirical evidences we have, it's not particularity persuasive, but an extremely interesting imagination and proposal indeed.
What if even stars in a galaxy form a communicative network, communication meaning sending and reacting to signals on a purely physical basis which doesn't translate to a meaning to us yet. Gravity waves, electromagnetic signals, signals we are not aware of... I am not saying stars talk gossip but that there could be a signal exchange and a systemic reaction. We see it in practically all life forms on Earth and a in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just a language issue. A fun technique: try to have this discussion with someone while banning the word “life” and its derivatives from the discussion. It usually turns out that you’re arguing over the preferred definition of an English word, and you can actually find a point of agreement on the underlying models.
Banning the root word of the domain is my favorite way of discussing any controversial topic. Try discussing religion with someone of a different faith without invoking God(s) or any specific prophets. It turns out that you're left with origin theories, a system of morals, and a mostly observations-based prototype to modern science. Now try international politics without using the terms war, peace, or border.