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

arxiv.org

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

#311

Post by LASR »

johngossman wrote: post #162

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,…

My hypothesis is that there is some objective definition of these phase changes such that the precise definitions of life etc doesn't matter.

My personal stab at an objective defintion: There is a sudden emergence of many more pathways for decay of the universe through entropy. The mechanisms that accelerate the creation of these new pathways is the set that includes "life".

Now with that base definition, we can talk about various forms of life - ones that involve DNA for example. But also others that do not.

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

#312

Post by lajy »

worldsayshi wrote: post #307
evanb wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Stars have to have enough mass to have enough gravity to start and sustain a nuclear reaction that constantly blasts energy out in all directions. This limits just how energy-dense they can get. What they lack there, they make up for in size and lifespan.

We can make sustained nuclear reactions in much less space using engineered pressure instead of gravity, so that skews the energy density ratio.

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

#313

Post by lutusp »

bsza wrote: post #204
lutusp wrote: post #164

"Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe? (arxiv.org)" Easily answered: * We don't know how consciousness comes into being, indeed we can't rigorously define it or unambiguously identify its presence or absence. * We believe we have it, but we aren't sure whether other animals and/or objects possess it. * Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all ma…

> We don't know how consciousness comes into being Consciousness and life are completely different things. The article doesn't even mention consciousness. > Therefore it follows that ... wait for it ... life is not a special state of matter or energy It is special in the sense that it's remarkably complex e.g. compared to a mineral. It is not special in the sense that it obeys the same laws as a mineral. > Therefore…

>> We don't know how consciousness comes into being

> Consciousness and life are completely different things.

Yes, but they have a dependent relationship. We argue that life doesn't require consciousness, but we also argue that consciousness requires life. IMHO both arguments have issues.

> The article doesn't even mention consciousness.

Yes, that's true, but it's an identifier of life -- that and the ability to reproduce. If the wind waves a flag, we don't attribute life to the wind. If a person waves a flag, we do. If a robot waves a flag, well, that's an open question at the moment.

> ... This process might be deterministic enough that it happens everywhere roughly at the same time (on a cosmological time scale).

Ah, I see an issue with that. We now know there are galaxies much older than ours (and younger), and if life is a common property of matter (still not determined) and if it relies on a certain set of preconditions, that would mean life would appear at widely different times, depending on location.

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

#314

Post by lutusp »

xmonkee wrote: post #175
lutusp wrote: post #164

"Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe? (arxiv.org)" Easily answered: * We don't know how consciousness comes into being, indeed we can't rigorously define it or unambiguously identify its presence or absence. * We believe we have it, but we aren't sure whether other animals and/or objects possess it. * Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all ma…

I agree with the overall thrust of your argument, but I disagree with this one somewhat: > Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption. An even simpler first few steps: * We experience matter, but we aren't sure if matter exists outside of our experience of it * Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provis…

> * We experience matter, but we aren't sure if matter exists outside of our experience of it

A nice point. One might call it the the solipsistic argument. Not easy to argue against, and not unlike the debate about consciousness -- we aren't close to saying what it is, or which assemblies of matter can be reliably said to possess it.

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

#315

Post by [deleted] »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #89
lachlan_gray wrote: post #79

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying. Simple organisms make a bedrock for complex organisms, and while the complex organisms have more specific needs, they are better at exploring,…

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…

[deleted]

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

#316

Post by lukifer »

daxfohl wrote: post #309
lukifer wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I certainly don't rule that out. But even the Hofstadter "strange loop" model explains awareness, moreso than the qualia of experience. (Show me an "ouch", and I'll show a way to accomplish identical behavior via -X weighting of utils.) And, it invokes the question of whether a sufficiently advanced predictive function in silicon/code would also have consciousness and/or qualia.

If yes, one essentially lands in IIT [0] (according to some, implying that even a light switch has a 1-bit micro-consciousness).

If no, then one wonders what utility qualia brings to the table, compared to simply optimizing the algorithm to work without subjectivity. (Would ML training be more effective if we could somehow add "yuck" and "yum" experiences? How would we tell, assuming we aren't accidentally doing it already?)

For another perspective, Peter Watts' novel "Blindsight" explores the idea that consciousness is merely a temporary local optimum, and eventually selected against, in favor of life forms which are intelligent without being conscious.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight

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

#317

Post by lutusp »

gfodor wrote: post #167
lutusp wrote: post #164

"Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe? (arxiv.org)" Easily answered: * We don't know how consciousness comes into being, indeed we can't rigorously define it or unambiguously identify its presence or absence. * We believe we have it, but we aren't sure whether other animals and/or objects possess it. * Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all ma…

That's not an answer, that's an argument. Occam's Razor isn't like the second law of thermodynamics. It's a heuristic.

> That's not an answer, that's an argument.

Fair enough, and I agree. But there may be no answer in a scientific sense -- testable, falsifiable and so forth.

> Occam's Razor isn't like the second law of thermodynamics. It's a heuristic.

Yes, true, but it's not meant to force a conclusion, only offer guidance, which might be entirely wrong at times.

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

#318

Post by lukifer »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #203
lukifer wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If we scale the rock up to earth, the ontological boundary would be similar, so maybe the earth is conscious?

I'd certainly entertain it as possibility. From a purely physical perspective, I think the Gaia Hypothesis [0] has some validity to it, even if the analogy to DNA organisms is deeply imperfect.

Where I stumble, though, is identifying a way in which the Earth is actively chasing any sort of free energy differential, meaning no iterated selection pressures, and (probably) nothing we could call intelligence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

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

#319

Post by 0xbadcafebee » 

   The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth.
   The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only
   reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted
   plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our
   age-old egocentric philosophical question,
   
     “Why are we here?”
    
     “Plastic… asshole.”

   - George Carlin

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

#320

Post by p-e-w »

LASR wrote: post #311
johngossman wrote: post #162

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,…

My hypothesis is that there is some objective definition of these phase changes such that the precise definitions of life etc doesn't matter. My personal stab at an objective defintion: There is a sudden emergence of many more pathways for decay of the universe through entropy. The mechanisms that accelerate the creation of these new pathways is the set that includes "life". Now with that base definition, we can talk…

That sounds like metaphysics. The Universe doesn't "want" to increase entropy, entropy increase is simply a consequence of applying basic statistics to matter and energy. There is no mechanism that actively explores various pathways for making entropy increase faster.
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