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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?

#321

Post by daxfohl »

lukifer wrote: post #316
daxfohl wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 […

One thing that hadn't occurred to me before, in light of some other threads arguing that it all comes down to maximizing entropy, which sounds reasonable, is that consciousness implies the ability to make mistakes, and mistakes imply missing the maximum. How to reconcile with consciousness maximizing entropy?

Maybe Blindsight is right; maybe there's a future life that has no consciousness and thus is always maximally entropic.

Or maybe it's a zero-sum game of simultaneous moves between entropy and some other force, or spatially-separated moves such that relativity cannot order them, making nondeterminism the optimal strategy. But now I'm making stuff up.

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

#322

Post by nojs »

jodrellblank wrote: post #152
simiones wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we have any tools that could possibly detect bacterial life anywhere where we don't have a physical presence at the moment. That is, even if Venus were teeming with simple life on every square cm, I don't think any of our instruments could pick it up unless we send a probe to collect and analyze samples. So, at the moment we have no hope of detecting this type of life outside the solar system even if it…

We've got photos from the surface of Venus: https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-... It's visibly not covered in moss, fungus, grasses, algae, slime. On Earth we talk about hot hydrothermal vents underwater: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/survival-at-hydrothermal-vent... - this says " the Pompeii worm [...] is one of the most heat-resistant multicellular animals on the planet, able to withstand…

Venus is perhaps a bad example but the point is true for all the other more likely places (Europa and others with subsurface oceans). We just haven’t explored them enough yet.

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

#323

Post by mjburgess »

uoaei wrote: post #149
mjburgess wrote: post #3

This is written like a literary academic blog article rather than an academic paper in the sciences. It's fully of literary free association and hyperbolic language, etc. At best it's a sort of mission statement for what would need to be a research programme with many many academic papers behind it. As it is, I'm not sure what the authors aim here is. It's a blog post.

M J Burgess, "semi-professional philosopher", doesn't recognize the context that this side of complex systems exists in and pooh-poohs the paper, demonstrating the "semi" more than the "professional".

Given a reply I take to be accurate,

> It's more like summary of a 30+ year research program

I'd say my comment is essentially correct. It is, indeed, a kind of blog article but summarising a massive research programme, rather than defining one.

I didnt speak to the validity or status of the content; I spoke to how odd it is in what's taken to be a journal. No journal (of science) would publish this as it is.

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

#324

Post by scirpaceus »

p-e-w wrote: post #320
LASR wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is also an argument that didn't sit well with me when I heard Guillaume Verdon / Beff Jezos on his recent Lex podcast state that the universe wants to produce more entropy, and that life evolved the way it has because it's more efficient at producing heat and entropy than, say, a rock.

Perhaps he said that loosely as a figure of speech, because it should be obvious (religious beliefs aside) that the universe does not "want" anything. The remaining question is whether the emergence of life as an efficient entropy generator is coincidental to the laws of thermodynamics, or incentivized (in an evolutionary pressure sense) by them.

Of relevance, the tendency of matter to organize optimally into energy-absorbing and heat-dissipating structures is a whole theory of its own - see MIT Jeremy England's theory https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...

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

#325

Post by csomar »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #289
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #274

Earlier 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…

The rock is continuously applying pressure to the mountain. That's why we have round planets and not huge random looking rocks. On an atomic level, the atoms themselves are full of action, though that will take a really long time to see the consequences of that.

ps: I subscribe to the heat death theory.

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

#326

Post by TriangleEdge »

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?

Could be that what we experience as the universe is only a minor fraction of what exists. I define life as "processing information", so AI by definition is a life form given this definition.

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

#327

Post by Tepix »

blueprint wrote: post #220
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,…

"life is the process from birth until death" "life is the way to make anything happen to you" without a body (via life), a consciousness cant do anything

If you're merely running in a computer you could still communicate with someone else and do things that way.

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

#328

Post by bmitc »

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?

The Sun uses gravity, due to its mass, for fusion containment. Fusion reactors on Earth use electromagnetic containment.

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

#329

Post by bmitc »

ajuc wrote: post #243
jmcqk6 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So where's the bacteria outcompeting moon dust? Theories which make life inevitable are inherently shaky because we have 1 sample.

Where are the conditions for life on the Moon? You can't have something if the conditions to form it are missing. Your question is equivalent to asking why stars don't form outside dust clouds.

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

#330

Post by bmitc »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #104
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,…

> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Sounds like observer bias. In terms of number of individuals, the vast vast majority of life on this planet is single cell prokaryotes, and always has been. And in terms of total bio-mass only plants exceed them but that's just because of how plants work (cover the surface with bio-solar-panels) Both bacteria and archaea haven't substantially change…

I don't understand what you're balking at. I didn't see anyone imply that the complexity of life going up leads to "us". The complexity of life does trend up. Nothing you mentioned refutes that.
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