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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?

#341

Post by kaashif »

bloopernova wrote: post #227
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…

I absolutely adore the simplicity behind this: Energy must balance, so it flows from high concentrations to lower concentrations. Things that help that flow are selected for. From that springs everything we are. Utterly amazing to me that from a gradient plus some random chemicals plus time equals humans, sex, violence, loss, birth, love, games, music, and so much more. All just to help the earth cool down a little b…

> Things that help that flow are selected for.

I don't get this part, why does this follow?

Why would life that transfers heat faster get selected for? This seems backwards to me: in reality it seems like life that is more capable or more adapted reproduces more, and that results in more heat moving around most of the time.

But progress can go backwards, if there were a nuclear war this would reduce heat transfer.

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

#342

Post by hermitcrab »

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?

Fusion only happens in the Sun due to incredibly rare quantum tunnelling events. That is why the sun can burn for billions of years. It takes a long time for the energy generated to reach the surface and escape, that is why the sun has a high temperature.

IIRC fusion reactors on earth use magnetic confinement to raise the temperature much higher than the sun's interior for a much higher rate of fusion reactions. I'm sure someone will be along to correct me if I got that wrong. ;0)

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

#343

Post by blueprint »

Tepix wrote: post #327
blueprint wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

that's called interfacing with a "body"

thanks for the downvotes, philosophy noobs

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

#344

Post by [deleted] »

Tepix wrote: post #327
blueprint wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

[deleted]

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

#345

Post by fuzzfactor »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #173
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,…

It's a complex topic. I think it really got kicked off with "What is Life?" and we've been able to build more details on it since then. There are many parts of the story that we know in incredible details. Chaos theory, information theory, non-equillibrium thermodynamics, complexity and emergence, auto-catalytic chemistry are all just parts of it, and each one are massive fields of study on their own. I'm not sure th…

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

Depends on whose expectations you are trying to meet.

To some it would be a major transition, to others it's just another everyday minor non-event in the very macro scheme of things.

If you're going to look at it mathematically it probably makes a difference when the number of non-extreme planetary environments begins to become significant compared to the number of possible chemical reactions among the limited number of elements in nature.

Only one of these numbers can reach truly astronomical proportions.

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

#346

Post by namaria »

zoogeny wrote: post #254
namaria wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not into winning debates. I just find interesting that conscious beings think they can imagine the absence of consciousness. For us consciousness is the fundamental reality. Furthermore I find the verbosity of German philosophy nearly unbearable, to be honest.

You say: "We can't conceive of things that are not experienced, by definition" I mean, you probably don't even realize that this view is influenced by Kant. You are giving a very poor retread of 200+ year old German idealism. For example, from the Wikipedia article on Critique of Pure Reason [1], Kant's major work: In the preface to the first edition, Kant explains that by a "critique of pure reason" he means a criti…

It's a fairly narrow view if you think I shouldn't philosophize unless I conform in full to all YOU have read.

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

#347

Post by ajuc »

bmitc wrote: post #329
ajuc wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are ways for the matter on the moon to dissipate energy faster than moon dust. We could build a moon base for example. It doesn't do it.

In fact as far as we know - most of the space in the universe is doing the dissipation in a very inefficient way.

Which means the theory that it will do it simply because of the "selection pressure" is empirically wrong.

Let's say a huge asteroid sterilized Earth 100 years ago. What could the life do to outcompete that? Was it the result of this "selection pressure" that it didn't or was it simply result of starting conditions and gravity?

This theory seems to provide almost no predictive value it just takes a thing that happened once and makes a story about how it had to happen.

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

#348

Post by ajuc »

nerdbert wrote: post #299
ajuc wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can't have theories without life to conceive of them, so in fact life is inevitable under any theory.

That's just antrophic principle, no need for any selection pressure or any particular theory at all. That's why all of them are shaky.

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

#349

Post by wolvesechoes »

dvt wrote: post #288
wolvesechoes wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not that I'm a Kantian, but he makes some pretty good points It is even debatable what points he really made. As always in philosophy.

I'd say that existence not being a predicate of any object is kind of non-debatable :)

It is, actually. Kant differentiates between "real predicates" and "logical predicates", and only states that existence doesn't belong to the first category, because it "doesn't enhance the concept". The whole distinction is quite unclear, and Kant's claims can be interpreted in multiple ways, as people do in some publications.

Actually this famous slogan that "existence is not a predicate" is closer to proposals of Russell and Quine.

Disclaimer: quoted phrases from Kant may not match exactly what you can find in English translations. I know Kant from Polish translations, so I improvised a bit.

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

#350

Post by shiroiuma »

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.

It can be said to "want" these things. When referring to something without consciousness or free will, such as a magnet, we can colloquially say something like "the magnet wants to move towards a (larger) ferrous object". Of course, this attempt at movement through magnetic force is just a consequence of the magnetic attraction between the two objects and not some type of conscious thought, but criticizing the use of the word "want" here seems like needless pedantry to me. This is HN, not a peer-reviewed scientific paper.
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