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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?

#31

Post by basil-rash »

paxys wrote: post #20
ta8645 wrote: post #5

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?

No, because AI is (for now at least) shaped and constrained by us humans rather than developing free based on the laws of the universe. Is it really "evolution" if a judge can rule that it violates copyright and stop all progress overnight? Or a random developer can add a bit of code to make sure the answers appease the right set of people? What we have today is a crude software approximation mimicking what we think…

What makes you confident our evolution didn’t occur the same way? The “fossil records” of the two are similar in many ways: lots of baby steps, giant leap with no known intermediary states, lots of baby steps, …

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

#32

Post by tgv »

cscheid wrote: post #4

Time to break out John Baez's checklist: https://archive.org/details/TheCrackpotIndex

Never heard of it, but it seems to give a good digest of the format. Unfortunately, it seems aimed at non-academic crackpots. It doesn't even award points for vacuous mentioning Schrödinger or Kant.

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

#33

Post by ta8645 »

paxys wrote: post #20
ta8645 wrote: post #5

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?

No, because AI is (for now at least) shaped and constrained by us humans rather than developing free based on the laws of the universe. Is it really "evolution" if a judge can rule that it violates copyright and stop all progress overnight? Or a random developer can add a bit of code to make sure the answers appease the right set of people? What we have today is a crude software approximation mimicking what we think…

> (for now at least)

Yeah, a lot of people get hung up on the term AI as it exists today, and protesting that it doesn't deserve such consideration. I should have been more explicit that I was speaking in the much more general sense, and on an evolutionary timescale, not about technology we'd recognize today.

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

#35

Post by tobbe2064 »

This reminds me. There was a paper published a couple of years ago and posted here on HN that actually calculated the probability of life aminoacid-based life emerging. Based on the complexity of the chain needed to start replicating. The conclusion was that it was vanishingly small in the observable universe but only close to 0 in the full universe.

I've since tried to find it without luck. Does anybody here know where I can read it or remember the article I'm talking about?

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

#36

Post by mewpmewp2 »

mavili wrote: post #28

There is nothing "expected" in a truly random universe. You cannot have your cake and eat it, there is either some sort of 'order' in the universe or there is none. You cannot place forms of order where it suits you but reject it when it doesn't.

There are expectations even with random. E.g. if you have a truly random dice and you throw it millions of times you would expect the occurrence of each number to be similarly around 1/6.

So it could be argued that given laws of universe, seeding it in any state could with very high odds come to an emergence of life, which makes it to be "expected".

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

#37

Post by r34 »

asow92 wrote: post #6

> We are, truly, Of Nature, not Above Nature. This sentiment has always made me question when people say things are "unnatural", "artificial", or "synthetic": If we ourselves are of nature, and these things are a byproduct of us, then aren't they naturally occurring? edit: added "synthetic" to reduce ambiguity.

That's why I use to claim that for me everything is a priori natural. Additionally I disagree every time I hear that "culture is the opposite of nature" (not sure where it comes from, but seems to be a well-grounded philosophical concept). For me it can't be so by the rules of logic alone.

On the other side: we have a lot of taboos in the language/culture and not all of them are bad in terms of social well-being or happiness of individuals (the very simple example is that we sometimes lie to our kids). And I think that what we hide behind those taboos tends to emerge as "unnatural" or rather usually "supernatural". I also usually don't agree that we don't need a revolution in physics, but I understand it is so successful in creating all those working machines and we have to maintain them... ;)

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

#38

Post by simiones »

xixixao wrote: post #16
mc32 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, maybe synthetic is a better word for many instances of their use. As in synthesized with the aid human intervention.

In which case coral reefs are also synthetic :)

Most coral reefs predate human intervention by a few hundred million years.

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

#40

Post by mewpmewp2 »

TravisCooper wrote: post #21

If you have an erroneous view of life and it's origins on earth, you'll come up with variations of this type of thinking. However, life didn't evolve through a random walk of chemical reactions turning into complex systems with the ability to replicate and gain ever increasing complexity over time. Not possible. Entropy is increasing.

> However, life didn't evolve through a random walk of chemical reactions turning into complex systems with the ability to replicate and gain ever increasing complexity over time. Not possible.

How else could it have evolved?

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