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Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
301–310 of 404 posts
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#302life is not just a rare happenstance, but a predictable outcome of the universe's own chemical dance
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#303Can'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.
I would be more enthralled if this didn't also mean literal extinction of us and everything that matters to us.
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#304life is not just a rare happenstance, but a predictable outcome of the universe's own chemical dance
Why do you think it's not rare? Something can be predictable and rare.
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#305I sat in on one of Stephen Wolfram’s YouTube lectures on his new physics project, and asked him about his conception of life in the big picture of physics. His perspective was that (if I may take the liberty of paraphrasing him) there’s nothing particularly special about life from the perspective of physics. What we call life simply correlates to parts of the physical world that have the highest degree of complexity…
That sounds like saying that that Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings are nothing special in terms of information science; they just unusually have an unusually high entropy content. Technically true in both cases, but if physics is irrelevant to life, why not just answer the that way, instead of taking all the life out of Life.
It actually has profound implications (at least, for me). And it goes the other way, too. You can just as easily say that if there is no binary category, of living/non-living, then it's fair to say that if I am alive, then everything is alive. I like that.
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#306Life is a profound mystery -- there is absolutely no explanation for it under a materialistic/naturalistic world view. The question of the origin of life is the most fundamental and interesting question because without life no other question can even arise.
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Sun outputs 3.9 x 10^26W, but it weighs ~10^30kg, so that would mean 10^-4W/kg. Human beings are closer to 1W/kg at rest.
The sun's power density is approximately the same as compost.
So does that mean that making a fusion reactor makes as much sense as building a containment vessel for a compost reactor?
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I would be more enthralled if this didn't also mean literal extinction of us and everything that matters to us.
Is it an extinction or just another type of evolution of humans? Evolution isn't the right word but AI will presumably be from us and carry some or the things that matter to us most likely.
Sure you aren't passing on dna like to natural born children but not all children have same ideals or cares of same things.
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there evidence of consciousness in a rock?
There isn’t the same kind of ontological boundary in a rock, as there is an organism. My hunch is: there’s a low-grade subjectivity/qualia to all of the universe, which would include the particles of the rock, but the rock would not experience an independent “rock-ness”. The consciousness of organisms are perhaps more like a dissociative state, analogous to a gravity well of subjectivity, such that the qualia are con…
I disagree. Chemicals are perfectly sufficient as a feedback mechanism.
I'd argue consciousness is a boring byproduct of evolution. You survive by predicting the actions of your competition. You predict your competition by introspecting yourself. Definitionally, consciousness.
Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
A static point mass in a gravitational field is already at its lowest energy state (a literal ground state if you will). It can only really do one thing, which is to stay. The logarithm of the number of states then is zero. So in some sense it cannot encode information at all. In fact I think more generally speaking, things that are at a global minimum of energy level cannot really be used to encode information (unless you have a mechanism to add entropy w/o increasing energy), because they have one state, and the log of the number of states then gives you zero bits. Probably another way to look at the idea that gravitational potential path-independence means memorylessness means devoid of bits of information.